


promise not to promise anymore

by bettercrazythanboring



Category: Morning Glories
Genre: 5 Things, 5+1 Things, Background Character Death, Character Development, Character Study, Crushes, Developing Relationship, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Hijinks & Shenanigans, The Entire Cast Is Mentioned At Some Point, Unresolved Romantic Tension, almosts, i went a little overboard on song lyrics sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-15
Updated: 2015-01-15
Packaged: 2018-03-07 16:56:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 43,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3177378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bettercrazythanboring/pseuds/bettercrazythanboring
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five things Hunter didn't do and one he <i>shouldn't</i> have done.</p>
            </blockquote>





	promise not to promise anymore

**Author's Note:**

  * For [brella](https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/gifts).



> [Title.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YqTSlvaadc)
> 
> Sooooooper late birthday present (slash also quite late Christmas present??? Idk, you said you wanted to get Casey/Hunter down the chimney, so) for the amazing, wonderful GWEN!!! Whose writing I adore more than I could ever express in words (though, boy, have I sure tried) and whom herself I adore even MORE, if that is even possible. So I figured I'd tailor every word of this specifically for her, from general tropes to her Achilles heels for this particular otp, to her favorite songs inserted at inappropriate times, to references to things she loves, right down to the using of roman numerals.
> 
> Love ya bud, I hope this was worth the wait.
> 
> Also, this is the longest thing I have ever truly finished (although I *have* written three things that were all considerably longer than that - all in the 80-110k range - just... abandoned before reaching what they were intended to be) so EVERYONE GO BE PROUD OF ME, because I'm proud of this and myself, and newsflash pride is less fun alone. 
> 
> CLAPS CLAPS CLAPS BECAUSE THIS IS FINALLY FINISHED okay now stop wasting time and go onward to read my prized and precious baby. (Also the parts don't happen close together - weeks or months pass between all of them but the last two.)

**i.**

You used to wonder as a kid, back when you still  _almost_  believed in such things, whether God had only meant to paint the skies with blue and black, and simply kept knocking over a can of glitter each night in bizarre accidents worthy of a daily comic strip.

The stars had made you feel strong and hopeful then, when they were just specks of dust littered across the roof of your home—constant and unchanging, whether you were staying with one parent or the other, or a friend, or alone in the forest behind your aunt's house—kept for no other purpose than to let you make wishes and allow others to pretend to predict your future. Then you'd grown up and found out how irrelevant your presence was in determining whether a star would continue blazing or collapse in on itself, and with it had come relief.

One by one, your classmates had gone through crises of faith upon realizing that the world would spin madly on regardless of whether they were still in it, but you'd always found the thought oddly comforting. So your life's not directly related to the functioning of the universe?  _Good_ —fucking up is what you do best; at least the rest of the world won't be subjected to the result of your humongous (or worse, utterly _inconsequential_ , like the rest of your existence) failures.

Yet even now, among all this death and destruction, those giant swirls of colorful gas still give you hope. You're no longer quite as sure that you have no bearing on whether the Earth will continue to revolve around the Sun, but they make you feel insignificant in such an  _exact_  way that the mere  _thought_  of the vast universe out there helps you stand tall and whole when you're about to break apart at the seams. (You're just some random kid on a weird rock floating in deep space; how much does it  _really_  matter whether your shirt is tucked perfectly into your pants?)

Thoughts and memories have been all you have for far too long; you're starved for the night sky, and you hadn't even realized it until tonight.

Something thuds to your right. You tense for a long moment—ready to defend your curfew violation with a rambling tongue and a roll of sky maps lying next to your hip that you couldn't read with a gun to your head—but soon a familiar blond head rises above the gutter.

Your back straightens out of the unattractive hunch on its own accord; before your mind can catch up to your body and coordinate the other movements, you somehow manage to trip over your own arms. (Even though that should be impossible, even though you're  _sitting_.) The slight clang makes her jolt—and once more when she sees  _you_  on the small roof—and then her fingers stay wrapped around the top rung of the fire escape for seconds and seconds as her face slowly twists into something that looks equally adorable and amusing to you. The expression freezes, emphasized by bright moonlight.

"Casey," you greet—not quite sure whether you're mocking her surprise.

Her lips knead together, hands tightening on the metal. " _Hunter_."

You nod along slowly—and then (because she stays exactly where she is, and you don't really know how to proceed, and the nodding takes a few seconds during which you don't feel like you're just sitting there uselessly) a couple more times. You can't keep your eyes from wandering to her illuminated form.

She's still but for her golden locks riding the breeze; they shimmer in the moonlight, pale and frail somehow with tiny strokes of clear white—it's almost as if she were shrouded in the nighttime sea itself. (Heaven knows she makes you feel just as lightheaded—yet so alert, so conscious of your every breath, of every fidget, of everything that only becomes important when she's there.)

A gust of harsher wind rushes over the roof. It doesn't sweep the silence away.

"Hey, uh, if you're on some super secret mission, I can just pretend I never saw you; it's no big," you say when she hasn't moved in enough heartbeats for you to start counting them. "Buuuuut on the off chance that you came here to enjoy the night…" You cautiously pat the tiles near you. Her gaze darts to your hand covetously. "It's a really good spot," you add, as if she didn't always choose the best and weren't here already.

Casey brushes her hair back and starts climbing up, but pauses halfway. "Are you sure it's okay?"

"Hmm? Oh, yeah, totally. You're the first person I've seen here all night. I really doubt the guards'll come check here when this entire place is teeming with students out of bed." You gesture to the vague chatter on the other side of the tower blocking these few square feet from the rest of the broad roof of this school. The Astronomy teacher's leading some sort of extra credit project; you kinda wanna kiss him on the mouth, because otherwise, even though you  _really_  wanted to come here, you wouldn't have  _dared_  to violate curfew for probably as long as you'll be here—which may or may not be synonymous with "as long as you'll live."

"No, I meant—" Her shoulders loosen slightly. Then, quieter: "I don't want to intrude."

"Oh." That hadn't even occurred to you. (Because it's  _ridiculous_.) "No, no. Come on up."

She smiles and takes your outstretched palm, probably more out of friendliness than necessity. Hers is warm and soft; it does things to your chest. You let go too soon for fear of getting attached to the feel of it, but there's not much in the way of personal space on this secluded patch of roof, and after she settles in, you end up with hands buried between your knees just to avoid accidentally brushing hers and making everything weird.

Not that it's not  _already_  weird, of course, with the blanket you'd brought up here so that your dry butt could stay that way after an evening of rain. Not that there's not an assortment of vending machine snacks piled next to your thigh so that you wouldn't starve and die in a less pleasant way than you imagine decapitation to be. Not that  _this entire thing doesn't suddenly look like an unconventionally romantic picnic under the stars even though picnics and romance were the furthest thing from your mind when you decided to fuck it and come up here, curfew be damned_.

(There is an apple digging into your hip. You brought an  _apple_. If you move even an inch, there will be an  _apple_  lying between you and Casey, after the way you two were supposed to meet under an  _apple_  tree— _god_ , this is a disaster.)

She lies back against the angled surface, fingers interlocked on her stomach, and inhales deeply. A peaceful grin forms there and catches you off guard; you want to stare at it forever, just to memorize the sight—but it's already weird, and so you follow suit, forcing your eyes to return to the equal magnificence above.

One of the tiny white dots flashes brighter than before, then starts flickering as if undecided on its fate.

"Why did you come up here?" she asks after what could've been seconds, could've been years. "Most people wouldn't risk it. Or wouldn't want to, anyway."

"Guess I just missed it," you say after a time. At her silence, you explain, "The emptiness, mystery, and...  _enormity_  of it all. It doesn't really matter how many space movies you watch; the real thing never gets any closer or any less… beckoning." And for as long as you can remember, there's been a hole deep within you that few other things could fill, even for a second or two. "That's kind of a weird word, but— I don't know. Why did  _you_?"

Something in her shifts instantly. You don't look at her, or touch her, or ask her about it, but the silence has weight now—of that you're sure.

"I was never really one for the aesthetics of space," she says carefully, raising her palm flat to the sky like a child. "Always more into the mechanics of it, you know? Give me orbits and collapse projections on one of those things and I'm  _there_. But… things that stay visibly still never held much interest for me." The other goes up too; she frames the sky like a photograph. "My mom, though, she loved it," she recalls with a slight smile. "Whenever we'd go camping, or even just stayed in the backyard past dark, she'd always get this look of… I don't even know how to describe it."

"I'm guessing I can imagine," you muse. (It may very well be identical to the one you wear at this very moment, listening to her.)

She chuckles slightly. "Yeah, probably. Everyone gets that look at  _something_." Her arms lower back down, fingers twisting. "We talked a lot on nights like that. More than any other kind, actually," she admits. "It got to the point where I'd sleep with a night sky pillow whenever she was working late. Just hugged it close until she came home or I fell unconscious. Either way, she'd be there in the morning."

"But you don't have it anymore," you guess, and finally glance at her from the corner of your eye. There's muted sorrow in hers.

"No, I don't," she agrees quietly. "And no amount of waiting or sleeping is gonna get me a one-on-one with her right now." Casey doesn't have to say it—not by the single tear rolling down her temple into her hair, not by the thickness of her voice—but she does anyway: "I miss her so much."

Something teeters on the edge of her voice—something so, so familiar to you in some vague, unknown way. (But she chokes it back and refrains from revealing, and so you don't go digging to identify it, even if something tells you you  _should_.)

At a loss for anything else to do, you reach down and hand her a  _Snickers_  bar; when she gives you a baffled grimace, the only explanation your idiot brain can stammer out is, "I hear chocolate helps in dealing with Dementors." It takes a moment for the fog to clear and her expression to lift, but then she's laughing, earnestly, genuinely, and you don't even care if it's at the reference or  _you_.

When it subsides and she rubs her face, the desolation returns to her movements, though not quite as solemn as before. "Sorry, I shouldn't have said anything. This is kind of what I meant by not wanting to intrude." She makes a vague gesture. "You probably just wanted to look at the stars in peace."

"No, hey, look, I'm bad with words and shit," you say, too quickly, "but if there's one thing I get, like,  _unconditionally_ , it's mom missing, okay? You're in good company," you add with a sad half-laugh. "Although mine's dead, so I guess that one-on-one is out of the question for me even if we ever  _do_  get out of here."

With a quick, downcast peek at you, she bites into the snack; crumbs scatter over her hoodie. "Wanna talk about it?" she says after a moment, but the offer falls short of sounding genuine.

"Not really," you say, mostly because you've never talked about it with anyone and you're not quite sure whether you're even  _capable_  of doing it at this point—and only a little because the thought of being that open and honest and  _vulnerable_  with Casey makes your heart thrum and your hands clam up. "She had a thing about this stuff, too, though. I rarely understood any of it, but she'd go on and  _on_  about how stars are like raindrops in an ocean, rippling through the universe until they eventually fade out." You can't help but soften at the memory. "Sometimes, when she'd had a bad day, she would switch the drops out for pebbles and say someone was  _really_  trying to set the world record in stone skipping," you recall with a slight chuckle. "And then other times she'd look up and say someone bigger was playing pinball with the satellites. And we always used to draw our own constellations in the sky—ridiculous things, like teapots and Fluffy, the three-headed dog."

"Sounds nice," she whispers.

"It was." You reach out and up, as if to grab a fistful of lights out of the darkness. The empty hand falls back to your forehead within seconds, as you always knew it would; the stars are not yours to have. "You know, up here, away from all that madness, it's almost like I'm back home. Almost like everything's normal. Almost like… I can just  _breathe_."

Her lips curve knowingly. "Instead of wondering whether it'll be your last breath? Yeah. It's weird, the things we find comfort in," she muses to herself, takes another bite. "Do you even remember when we  _wanted_  to come here? When we thought it'd secure our futures and be this great experience? I  _actually_  used to think that," she says with a shake of her head. "For  _years_."

"Feels like a lifetime ago," you say, and it rings true in ways you hadn't intended—as though a lifetime had indeed passed, as though you were older than you can even know, as though perhaps there's some deep unlocked part of you with a stranger living inside. So to ease the hot anxiety creeping up your neck at the thought of time and space being wibblier, wobblier, timier, and wimier than you'd always considered it, you ask, "Do you ever wonder how would it have turned out if it really  _were_  an ordinary school? I mean,  _extraordinary_ , of course, but… normal."

Casey turns to you, stares for a moment too long—then claps hands to her thighs, a grin blossoming. "Oh, man, are we playing this? We're  _playing_  this," she declares. Her knee hits a roof tile when she shifts to lie on her side, facing you. She rubs it with a wince and motions for you turn, too. "I haven't actually thought about it until right this second, so you go first."

"What?" you sputter, trying to get comfortable with sharp edges digging into your shoulder. "I didn't sign up for that. I don't even know what we're  _playing_."

Her grin sours. "Oh, come on—I bet you have some whole alternate universe reality worked out in your head. But fine," she says and goes quiet for a moment. "I  _say_ … if this were a regular school… Hodge would've been fired for giving  _really_  crap advice to her students," she announces triumphantly. "And possibly been caught in a nepotism lawsuit."

" _Oh_  boy. Okay, uhh…" You take a deep breath, thinking. "I say… Daramount would still be scary as shit," you conclude without a doubt. "But like in that brilliant tightass way where all the driven students would fall over backwards trying to get into one of her classes because she's really  _good_?"

"She  _is_  probably the best teacher here, when she's not torturing people," Casey agrees—then falls silent with a frown. "Wait, Hunter—" she grabs onto your arm "—if there's no torture and the worst they can do is put us in detention, do you realize the  _pranks_  this would mean?" Her voice beams with urgent excitement. "Imagine all the boarding school movies you've ever seen. Imagine them with  _social media_."

And one by one, memories from that lifetime ago fill your mind—all the shenanigans your classmates had gotten up to in and out of school hallways while you'd been too busy visiting hospitals and wanting to be alone. "Oh, man. Do you think someone would run a rumor blog about this place and all our teen drama?"

Wonder seeps into Casey's eyes. "Shit, I can  _totally_  see Pamela as some sort of terrifying Gossip Girl," she says, fingers playing with her hair. "All kinds of blogs, really. News, campaigns, photography… Oh,  _The Answer_  could be on the internet instead of trash paper," she offers with an only slightly mocking grin. "Fashion, too—god, I can already imagine Ike giving tips on  _'how to accessorize shapeless school uniforms without losing your masculinity.'_ " Her hand glides in front of her face as she speaks.

"It would be horrible," you agree. "Is it weird, though, that I kinda feel like he'd be less of a dick without life-and-death circumstances? Well, that and the murdering his dad, I guess."

She blinks, jolts back. "Ike killed his  _father_?"

"Uh." You frown. "Yeah, apparently? But… the dude's still alive somehow. And also  _here_. Or was, but not anymore?" You gesticulate, grimacing. "I don't really know; Jade told me some stuff last week, but she didn't understand it either, so with me it's like… confusion once removed, or something."

"She didn't tell  _me_  that." But the words sound less offended and more… concerned.

"Um, to be fair, you haven't been around much lately." Your shoulders tug up. "Speaking of Jade, though—I bet we'd basically never see her because she'd be in detention all time. Or… with Ike," you mutter with a grimace. Casey gives you a look. "I overheard things a couple days ago that I will not repeat here, but point is, it's not out of the realm of possibility, okay?"

You start intensely examining the jagged edges of your fingernails, but in your peripheral vision you still notice every drop of effort it takes her to keep her face straight. "Right, sure," she says. "Have you, by any chance, been drinking tonight?"

The bottle you hold up in a toast is pointedly plastic. " _Fine_. Don't believe me." You take a large swing of the pineapple juice, trying to make a show of it—and end up, predictably, trying to muffle your chokes in a closed mouth while your eyes water. "Whatever," you croak out hoarsely, hoping she won't notice. You flip through possible safer topics in your mind at the speed of sound. "So, Zoe—probably cheer captain by now, right?"

"Definitely," she says, casually as ever, and reaches over you to grab a can of soda. (She's so close. You can feel the warmth coming off her. It sucks whatever breath you've managed to recover right out.) "You know, I've always wondered whether we would've gotten along better under different circumstances," she says and gathers her hair up into a loose tail. "Like, was our conflict based on situation or personality? Is there some alternate universe where we became total BFFs?" she wonders. "Or were we always destined to bicker and be horrible roommates to each other and there was no way around it?"

"Huh." You turn that over. "No idea, but I bet she'd talk to me even less than she already did. And would  _probably_  not try kill me—although I guess there's really no guarantees on that front," you add wryly. "But, uh— Oh, hey, I just remembered; there were these twins at my old school who pretended to be each other like every week just to see how long it would take for somebody to notice. I think they even took  _exams_  for each other a couple times," you add, wondering how you'd ever forgotten. "Does that sound like the Fukayamas to you?"

"Um… Maybe, I don't know," she mutters, suddenly lower. (You don't press the question, because all of you barely even knew one of them and now know the other even less, and this is all just pretend, and after the night ends there will still be a corpse in the morgue.) "What about you?"

You blink. "What  _about_  me?"

"Where would  _you_  be, if we were normal?"

" _Hah._  Oh, god, probably still running with the AV Club and sucking at school, just a little less traumatized." You blow out a breath and take another swing of your drink (cautiously this time), thinking through the last few months. Your eyes sting just a tiny bit when you add, quieter, "I'd know someone I only met once a whole lot better."

 _This_  you can say with certainty, unlike everything else that's come out of your mouth tonight. The day of the woodrun may have been the first and last time you've ever spoken to Maggie, but you've found out a lot about her since, and all of it makes you mourn not only her, but what could've been, too.

Your gaze lifts back up to Casey; she doesn't flinch away. Neither does she say anything, so, finally, you prompt, "And you?"

And there it is again—something hidden on the tip of her tongue, something that doesn't roll out when she smiles quickly and says, "Not running for president, for starters." She rolls back onto her back again—away from you, though somehow it doesn't feel that way. "I'd be too busy for trivial positions like that.  _Head in the books, arms in the nooks_."

"What?"

She titters with a shake of her head. "It's something my dad used to say whenever he found me tinkering with stuff and reading the manuals so hard that I'd forget I had a nail gun in my hand. I had…  _unusual_  hobbies, I suppose. I was always working on one project or another, and often I'd come down for dinner with  _literal_  motor grease in my elbows," she recalls fondly. "I don't think I realized it then, but I spent a  _lot_  more time doing that or reading about… anything, really, than I did having social aspirations—like popularity or student council. I have a bit of a one-track mind, I guess you could say, and the day I got here it was  _definitely_  heading toward pure education," she says. "I doubt much would've changed in that regard."

You don't ask where it leads now. You're not sure you want to know.

"Although that reminds me," she continues, brow furrowing. "I wonder if Papers Guy would've found me again." And you could swear your heart expands to about five times its size for the span of a single beat. "The strangest thing happened on my first day," she explains when your alarm probably passes itself off as puzzlement. "It was like something out of an anime—something you never actually expect to happen to you, right? I was walking in the hall and—BAM!—just rammed into someone forehead-first."

"… _Oh_." And suddenly your lungs are joining the organ malfunctioning club.

"Our papers scattered to the floor and it was exactly the kind of moment that would jumpstart a love interest subplot in basically any movie ever," she adds with a laugh. "I pretty much just bolted the fuck out of there, but even then, a part of me was  _so convinced_ , like,  _legitimately_ ," she emphasizes, "that it would keep happening again and again until I underwent some sort of magical epiphany and realized I could have  _more than one thing at a time in my life,_  oh, the wiseness." She flicks a peanut into her mouth, then another, and another. "And then, of course, within months—or, god forbid,  _weeks_ —I'd have given up on my dating moratorium entirely, and I would spend the next two years with the guy. And probably the rest of my life, too. All because romcom tropes said so," she declares with a befuddled grimace. "It was kind of terrifying."

"…Ah."

She bumps her shoulder into yours lightly, as if to remind that you talk this way all the time, and continues cheerily, "Anyway, I figure I'm in the clear now—pretty sure all that no longer applies in horror where everyone's about to get murdered whether they're in love or not—but sometimes I  _do_  wonder what would've happened if the genres hadn't changed so fast."

And though you don't say anything—though you  _can't_ , because all your effort goes into trying to make sure you're still breathing—it only takes her moments to let out a loud sigh and say, "Okay, fine: I'd probably take the nice, normal, cliched romantic life over this.  _Anything's_  better than this," she adds. "But not by much." Her voice is quieter now. "It doesn't really matter anyway; this is what the world is to us now, and that's not gonna change. Games like this are fun, but there's no use in actually  _dreaming_  about what-ifs." She pulls her sleeves down over her fingers, rubs them together. And then, with a bemused smile: "Guess I'm just kind of amazed that out of everything I've seen here, the weirdest thing to happen was so…  _normal_."

And you could say, then, that you were the guy that she rammed into on that first day. You could say that you still sometimes wake up with that spot on your forehead throbbing—but in a way so far from painful that if you were Pinocchio and ever called it that, your nose would grow for miles and miles into eternity. You could say that romcom tropes appear in a variety of genres, including whatever the fuck you're living through now, and that they don't have to come at the expense of either character's agency.

You could tell her that you want to be there when she needs you, and that you know nothing can happen right now, and that maybe it doesn't even matter whether it ever could, just as long as she's in your life at all.

"Yeah, that's… pretty ironic," is what you say instead as she finishes off her  _Snickers_  bar and gets a bit of chocolate stuck to her lip that your thumb doesn't wipe away. And in a sky full of stars, you think you see  _her_.

 

 

_we ditch the whole scene and end up dreaming instead of sleeping_

_i watch the stars from my window sill, the whole world is moving and i'm standing still / don't know how else to say it_ ;  _don't want to see my parents go / if i lay here, if i just lay here, would you lie with me and just forget the world? / look at the stars, look how they shine for you and everything you do_

* * *

 

**ii.**

This isn't right. You were supposed to protect  _her_ , to be there for  _her_ , not to get stuck watching as she falls forward just a little more with each second, because for some mystifying nonsensical reason she won't let you fall to your death. Her pained grunts echo in your ears like nails against chalkboard, like a microphone howl in a crowded room. It is  _literally_  the opposite of what you've wanted since the moment your foreheads first cracked together and you obtained a concussion you'll probably never recover from.

(By "opposite" you don't mean that the situation should be reversed—with  _her_  dangling from a crack in the ground over an abyss of unknown destination and you trying to pull  _her_  up—because that would  _also_ , paradoxically, be the opposite of what you wanted.) (What you  _want_  is for Casey to live—a goal put in peril every time you are part of the equation, it seems.)

You find it in yourself to obey her every rule—stay still, look up, try to find a foothold;  _no_ , Hunter, stop squirming—because Casey is  _smart_  and Casey  _knows how to do these things_ , but that doesn't really change the fact that you just heard her shoulder pop, that her grip has been steadily loosening for several minutes, that you have the upper body strength of a fucking frog. (You're assuming—because why would frogs need toned arms with their famous gymnast legs—but you were predictably late the day they covered amphibian gym-attending habits in Bio class.)

You wish she'd let go, when your nails claw her skin open and blood trickles down onto yours.

_Come on, Casey. You can still make it out of this._

But you know better than anyone that Casey never,  _ever_  gives up. Not on anything, not on anyone—not even you. It's hard to call it her best quality when you can't shake the feeling that it will undo her and the world too someday, but it's probably the truth. (Maybe she'll end the world in her stubbornness, maybe the world will come apart on its own and take her down with it, or maybe, just maybe, you don't want to admit that Casey and the world are one and the same to you.)

"Should've brought a backpack," she mutters under her breath. You only get a moment to wonder whether she thinks a History textbook will hold the answers before she yanks a tree root out from somewhere in the shrubbery above with one hand. The movement sends her slipping farther down the edge; you don't pay any attention to what she does afterward, all of it focused on every damned new half inch of her Woodrun shirt visible to you. (The dirt marks are fresh; you hope to every god you can think of that the specks of blood, stark against the white, aren't.)

Somewhere in your peripheral vision her muscles ripple and blonde strands stick to the sweat on her neck, and she must have called your name three times before two identical tree ropes hit you in the face, snapping you out of worrying more about her impending death than yours.

"Grab on," she commands. And finally the other fear—the normal, mortal,  _sensible_  one—kicks in.

You were never very good at monkey bars. Really, you were never particularly good at  _anything_ , but you'd always hoped that if your life ever depended on a physical activity of some sort, it'd be hula hooping. (Especially around the neck. You'd looked very much like a chicken, with your big nose and tufts of red, but you could keep it up for nearly an hour.) This? This is serving you up for death on a silver platter. Golden, even. With a diamond encrusted edge.

 _This_  is eternity spinning around you in bold, cold whirs as you let go of her hand and switch to something you trust far less. Your heart leaps; your breath shudders. (A tear escapes you and races toward the stomach climbing up your throat.)

But it works.

There's pain in her sigh as she takes back her gashed, dislocated arm, but there's also relief in it. You try to smile up at her, to mutter something encouraging, but suddenly you're too busy trying not to throw up from all that death-defying exercise, and when you open your eyes back up, she's gone.

You know she's not, really—that she's getting help or concocting some of her own, that she's not gonna leave you like this. (Even if that could very well be for the best.) Despite all that knowing, your heart automatically sinks; you are entirely useless here, utterly dependent on her. You hate yourself for wishing she'd crunch leaves extra hard or babble at you, just so you'd really  _feel_  her there, like you're not alone, but that doesn't make the wishing any less potent or her any louder. Your ears strain anyway.

With nothing better to do and the air too thin to breathe, your feet flail helplessly around the cliffside, searching for the barest of footing. Pointless.

The roots hold sturdy and strong; you're right about to ask whether you're supposed to grip both with two fists or clasp one in each hand—because she is Casey and Casey  _knows these things_ —but then they start moving. "Whoa," escapes you before you, thankfully, remember not to let go.

Bit by bit, you're lifted; the lifelines don't rip, not for more than a few bruises on their springy barks—but your knuckles do, as you approach the edge of where space and gravity stopped cooperating. They scrape and break open against the sharp rock; a pained hiss escapes someone who is  _way_  less grateful than you want to be. You do the first thing that pops into your head to leave—because you are Hunter and apparently you can run half a mile with a bullet lodged in your shoulder, but a papercut will incapacitate you for a  _week_ —and one stupid move later you're hanging from an actual  _tree_  now that hangs caught between growing half out of air and uprooting itself entirely to fall into doom.

The hard ropes go limp and motionless to your left; the sound of a collapse follows an exhausted grunt up above.

You're on your own this time.

(And it'll never occur to you that maybe your adrenaline-soaked memory blocks the next few minutes as soon as they're over not because they're terrifying and you can barely even  _fumble_  your way to safety, and this is just what you  _do_  now, creating timeline gaps right and left to avoid coping with their content, but because you did just fine, and the thought of having abilities and self-reliance and  _potential_  frightens you far more than being pathetic ever could.)

"Nice job," she manages in a shallow breath, heaving flat on the ground, when you've finally hauled yourself up the rest of the way. Her feet remain hooked around a fir trunk behind her, ankles bruised and shirt dirtied with moss and mud; she must have dragged herself backwards across the forest floor to save strength and avoid losing her own balance.

You pause literally hugging the solid ground to look up at her. "Are you  _kidding_?" you demand earnestly and slightly out of breath, one hand massaging the calf bruised during your unfortunate original fall. "I nearly tripped and fell all over again—which is… predictable, whatever," you mutter. "If  _that's_  nice, then what is you heroically saving my whole entire existence from sure and painful—maybe temporary, if this whole reincarnation deal pans out—death?" you ask.

Her lips quirk up in one side, but it's a tired expression. "It was no big."

You crawl over to her panting but otherwise still form and clumsily lay your hand on hers. " _Thanks_ ," you say, lower now. "I don't know why you thought that was something worth doing, and a part of me kinda wants to slap you silly for risking life and limb just to save mine when we  _all_  know I'm not gonna put them to any use, but... Thank you." Her golden curls shift when she peeks up at you as though something doesn't quite add up; you give her a noncommittal shrug before you admit, "It's always right after not dying that I remember how much I kinda wanna  _live_."

(It's always near  _her_ that it gets even clearer.)

A quiet chuckle escapes her, as if she can relate. "Let's all just hope you don't have to remember again for a long time, yeah?" She pulls herself upright and immediately winces at her injured arm. Fittingly, it's the guilt, the downcast eyes—she got hurt helping you, she'll probably have scars left by  _you_  and your stupid nails—that let you notice the green leaves scattered next to your hip; you immediately tear a few off to inspect the ridges. "Uh. What are you doing?" she asks.

"Give me your arm," you say, nearly command, and lay a handful of plantain weeds on the open wounds when she offers it—because this, at least, is something you can do, a way you can lessen the damage if not start repaying her. Healing properties of forest plants is the one morsel of information still lingering from the first and only hiking trip you ever went on, the one non-fictional tidbit you're sure of. (...Unless the herbs in your hands are actually sorrels—in which case, awkward. And acidic, possibly.)

"Oh, thanks," she says and holds the leaves close. You dig around and pluck a few more, then start chewing on them to draw out the juice and  _really_  cleanse the deep scratches; it's kind of gross, you suppose—and Ike would probably say something about exchanging bodily fluids—but, hey, it's the least you can do.

And then the earth underneath starts shaking and rumbling—just as it had ten minutes ago. "Shit, not  _again_ ," you say and jump to your feet, staring at the ground for any new cracks, ready to bolt. "Okay,  _this time_ , you drop me."

She spares you a glare. " _No_. And it's not gonna come to that." Her brow furrows, eyes glazing over. "Hold on; can you hear where it's coming from?"

"It's not thunder," you protest. "Not like earthquakes are small enough to run away from or anything."

"No, no,  _listen_ ," she says, leaning to the side, but doesn't take her eyes off her feet. "It's not an earthquake. I saw some plans and maps in Hodge's office; there's no tectonic plates underneath this goddamn place," she mutters, thoughts racing far ahead. "Whatever this is, someone's doing it."

And just like that, the other side of the chasm you were just hanging into disappears.

It drops. Slides. Falls. Other words you cannot think of. It's three seconds of ear-splitting crashes, an image of ground collapsing straight out of a post-apocalyptic movie, and then the entire horizon has begun ending just a few feet away.

You blink, as if that will somehow undo it. You squint through the empty fog, as though there were something beyond it. (And for a fleeting moment you think there is, somewhere farther than your eye can reach.) Your heart's too busy trying to climb back up your knees to let you take a few steps and peek over the edge, to see what's below.

(Maybe it's Hell. You're not sure you're ready to find out.)

A few neglected feet of solid rock break off the edge of this giant abyss; you flail backwards, retreating beyond what is strictly necessary. "Casey," you stammer out just before another giant piece of forest cracks off into somewhere below to your left, "uh, I think we need to go back," you manage weakly. "To, uh, warm rooms and teachers who aren't  _technically_  allowed to kill us."

You think you see her nod repeatedly, eyes glued on the vast emptiness. "G-Good idea." Are either of you breathing? "I'm... pretty sure it's that way." The rough terrain starts crunching beneath her weight, and you kind of see her shaking; you follow her, as you have always done since the first time she asked.

And so you plod away, and it turns to a trot, and  _that_  quickly becomes an outright race—one the advancing collapse will soon win. Pathways to unknown depths appear near one of you with a frequency that begins at nearly a thousand steps but grows to just a few dozen, and soon it becomes perilous to look up from your feet for even a second. Once, it gets so close that you have to pull Casey back to safety by the front of her shirt—which tears and then hangs limp half-off her chest, and it'd be awkward because you can kind of see her bra, but you're too busy trying to avoid tripping on your unraveled shoelaces to focus on trivialities like that.

Because that's what they are.

Because your body's functioned almost exclusively in panic mode for the last hour, and because you have no idea where you're going, and because there are no screams. There are  _no_  screams. Or flares, or emergency megaphones, or  _anything_.

The farther you run, the more it feels as though Casey is the only other person in the world.

That's weird—that there's no commotion—right? It's not unreasonable to expect there to be  _some_  bustle, especially since these thundering roars of earth's fury probably have potential to actually  _deafen_  people. There's no way that that wouldn't have woken everyone up… So where's the chaos? Where's the panic? You've  _got_  to be getting close by now... unless you ran in the wrong direction somehow.

No, no, it's the right one—finally, that familiar assembly clearing rears its unkempt lawn.  _Finally_ , home; finally, adults who'll know what to do.

But Casey halts with a gasp after taking the first step onto the grass and you run into her. (She grabs your hand to steady you without even turning her head. She doesn't let go after you are firmly back upright. Your fingers start to tingle.)

"It can't be," she whispers. There's something desperate in her voice that makes you look up from your linked palms, to the sight you hadn't deemed as worthy to pay any attention to yet. And then color, and heat, and hope leaves you, too.

A pillar of dust rises from about halfway across the grass, bleak and dense and almost smelling of stale smoke. It does this again and again, a handful of times per minute. Each time, it takes a moment to settle, and, each time, in those few seconds before the next one bubbles up, what's beyond it can be seen clear as day.

There's  _nothing_.

If your heart had been stuck in the kneecaps before, then now it's trying to break out from six feet under. "No, no… That's…" You grip her hand tighter. "I mean, they can't  _all_  have fallen down, right? The Academy has  _rules_  and, and, and  _things_  and…"

The empty air stares back at you. Casey whispers, "And what if everyone  _making_  those rules went down too?"

"...Then we'd be free," you say after a hard swallow. "But no,  _no_ , 'cause our friends have to be free, too, and we have no idea how to get out of this place, and… No." You're still standing behind her, your left hands intertwined. Her head sags back against your shoulder slightly; she seems almost surprised to find it there. "Maybe there's something below," you say. "Like, a cushion or something. Maybe everyone's just gone, not…  _gone_." (Why— Oh, god,  _why_  does death keep following you? Where the fuck do you go to issue a restraining order?)

"Maybe," she agrees, but it sounds a lot like what you'd said to Andy when he told you he's gonna visit his puppy in the faraway special farm when he saves up enough allowance money.

A minute passes, and another, and another, and you really hadn't thought you'd be motionless for this long for the rest of the day, but another ticks slowly by and neither of you move from the edge of a lawn half-eaten by the vast emptiness. It's a grumble coming from nearly under you that finally shocks you both out of this haze, moments before a part of the clearing too close for comfort cracks and falls away.

With more willpower than you thought you'd ever possess, you let go of her hand. "Casey, we need to go."

"Where?" Her voice isn't weak, but it also isn't hers. "At this rate, these entire grounds will have been swallowed up in an hour or two," she says, curling in on herself. "We might as well see where it leads."

"No, no, come on; we don't know for sure what happened," you say too quickly, because a part of you thinks she's right. "And we gotta keep fighting till the end, right? Maybe whoever's doing this will stop it and then we'll have to repopulate the Earth by ourselves or something." You peek around to look at her face, meet exasperation. "Okay,  _bad example_ , yeah, but, come on—you just spent all that time and effort trying to pull me up and now you're just gonna jump down? Doesn't sound like you, is all I'm saying."

And so she runs.

Runs alongside you, winding between trees and over wild berries that stain her ankles—you have to remind yourself over and over that it's not blood—all to skip over newly forming cracks in search of some safe haven. She hasn't spent as much time in these woods as you have, but she's Casey, and she's seen maps of most of this place, and if she's willing to bet that the epicenter is, in fact, located at the center of this place—which is not the actual school buildings, funnily enough—then that's good enough for you. The nearest corner it is.

But you've been running for probably two hours now, and there was that time when everyone thought you were asthmatic because of how badly you'd get winded, and even though you're a perfectly fine specimen of the human being—just a little weak and prone to not hearing clocks—you're just not that  _durable_. (Or strong. Or willful. Or fast. Or, really,  _anything_.)

Your legs burn and your lungs feel like they're closing up shop for the day, and every step is harder than the last.

Surprisingly, Casey's not faring much better. It's due of her injuries—or at least that's what you tell yourself because her holding back to avoid leaving you behind would be so  _beyond_  stupid that you'd want to yell at her, and your lungs hold no capacity for that right now—but that doesn't change the fact that the threat looming behind you seems to only be gaining speed.

It's only a matter of time now; the ground will collapse under your feet within minutes. The inevitable is quicker than you. It always seems to be  _so much_  quicker. (How are you still here, after all that inevitability?)

And finally… "I can't, I can't," you breathe, stopping to bend over. Rocks crash a hundred yards away. "Go on ahead, Case. I just… I can't. Gonna lie here and see what happens." You wipe your face of what feels like about a glassful of sweat.

"Mind if I join?" She gives you a look when you glare up. "I can't  _either_ , you know. Marathons, yes. This, no."

Casey leans against an evergreen that bathes her face in bars of sunlight, and finally looks up from her feet. There is so much world around you, so much beauty and wonder. She seems to take it all in, between the pants and clutching herself close, and wiping her face of what is probably sweat but could also be tears. And yet you only look at her, trying to memorize every freckle, every strand, every scar in this moment right now.

Her shirt's still torn, but it somehow suits her; she was always the savior.

"When did it become daylight?" she asks, forehead creasing. Doom strikes fifty yards away now. "I thought the sun had already set when you dragged me out here."

A dying chuckle rumbles up you. "Let's not make it sound like it was my idea, okay? All I did was mention a lab," you remind her.

"Yeah, fine." She huffs out a breath, lips vibrating. "We ended up alive an hour longer than everyone else because of me. Yay." She looks back down—to you, to shadows, to approaching death. Thirty paces now. Rue falls over her gaze. "I could still fight. I have no energy to run away anymore, but if we don't die immediately, I  _will_  fight, I promise," she says and clumsily takes a single step to lay her good hand on your shoulder. You straighten upright and lay yours on top of it. "But— Look, if this is it, if this is where it all ends, then I just want you to know, Hunter, I..."

There's something in her voice that sends tingles up from the base of your spine. It calls to you despite the exhaustion and fear, and though she says nothing else, that silence is important, too. And that's when you see it—in her eyes, in how her hand fists into your collar, in how she can't get another word out—a sentiment too unmistakable for even  _you_  to doubt yourself out of it.

Something inside you clenches as she moves closer still and, though it feels surreal, your hand finds a home on her waist before you can even think of it. Her face is two inches away and your whole body lights up under her touch, and suddenly the world is too small to contain both of you. Her scent fills your everything. Her storming, teal gaze washes over and swallows you whole. She is too close to let you emerge from this flame without charcoal in the gaps of your teeth.

And you could die happy here, you know, despite everything—in the arms of this girl who's always bitten off more than she can chew and then waved away anyone concerned enough to offer a Heimlich.

Delirious warmth fills your chest as her mouth lunges for yours, and there's nothing you can think of that you would want more, right then and there, than for that half second of anticipation to explode into something amazing and wonderful—so instead, you pull away and release her before the weight of her fingers can leave dents in the fabric of your shirt. And against every instinct you possess, you leave her behind and dash back toward the broken earth as though wings had sprouted off your back—because it's  _daylight_.

"Wh—"

" _Run_ , Casey!" You call out over your shoulder, already at the edge of safety. "Sprint!  _Promise me you won't die in the next three minutes!_ "

Your legs don't slow down even a bit as the nothing approaches, and there's no time to look back at her, to see whether she listened to someone else for once. You leap over the empty space and onto falling bits of land that are perfectly intact but for their sinking quality.

You did it.

And you do it again, and again, encouraged by how far there is to fall, bounding from isolated rock to isolated rock deeper and deeper into the cold, foggy abyss toward something you'd normally never in a million years rely on your shitty sense of direction for. (But then you'd also never thought you'd be the one to break away from Casey's lips, so it's a day for firsts.)

It's the twenty-third jump that lands you on something familiar. Vague silhouettes of trees against moonlight play in your memory, and you finally slow just enough to drop to your knees and rummage through the floor littered with dead leaves and twigs. It keeps freefalling and so do you along with it; wind howls in your ears and nausea climbs up out of you. You're not sure what you're looking for, but it'll be intuitive and chaotic and  _right_  somehow, and—  _Yes!_

You don't even inhale a very likely last breath before hauling yourself over to the small mound that once bore, or will someday bear, a circle drawn in black chalk over wooden panels—before letting the bright silver light envelop you, before allowing ancient, foreign words to fold over your tongue, before closing your eyes because the pessimist in you doesn't want to see the flying debris that will surely crush your skull.

* * *

 

The backs of your eyelids turn dark; you don't lift them to find out whether it's because the spooky mercury lights disappeared or because they  _worked_. (Or because you're dead and between lives, and it's much less painful than rumored.) There seems to be something much more important to do right then, something bigger than mortal curiosity, but you forget what it was as soon as the sound of her calling your name reaches you, a lifetime later.

"...Casey?" you whisper, sure you'd imagined it, but then the sound repeats, more desperate this time. "Yeah,  _yeah!_  I'm here!"

Your eyes snap open long after you hear the hasty steps approach; the first thing you see is a half-torn shirt hanging off a bloody shoulder under curls she hadn't bothered to gather into a ponytail. The second is a darkness reigning over a forest with no chasms or holes in sight.

You sag against yourself. "Holy shit, it  _worked_."

"It did. I don't know what it was, but it did," she says breathlessly, just before tackling you in a hug that slams you both against the ground. "Thank  _god_  you're alive. I've been calling for you for the last half hour."

"Sorry, I think I zoned out. And, hey, right back at you." You gather your breath and your wits, and your courage, and then it dawns on you. "Actually... I think  _everyone_  is. Alive, I mean. I think we were the only ones ever in any danger." And it's that thought that pumps strength back into your limbs. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but come on—let's go check."

"What? Wait, how?" She releases you and brushes her hair back from her damp forehead—and the savior is back, and that fleeting moment is over, and it's worth it. She's alive. "What happened; what did you do?"

"Uhh. Went on impulse, mostly." You begin the slow, leisurely trek back, no longer quite sure whether curfew's still enforced, whether you still need to be careful. "It's this thing that happened during woodrun. Light changes and weird weather, and a sort of emptiness; I can't really explain it," you say. "I think it was time travel? But also not. I don't know; I have no idea what actually happened, then  _or_  now, but— Something I did apparently fixed it, so…"

"Oh."

Her forehead's scrunched up as though a fleet of asphalt rollers couldn't smooth it out; a snort bursts out of you and your head falls into your hands. " _Trust me_ , I understand it less than you do. I guess I just figured, what's better, you know? Certain doom—death, likely; other difficult supernatural fight, possibly—or slight chance of pacifistic way out via something stupid?" You shrug, hands stuffed into pockets.

"You were very brave," she says with a friendly bump of her shoulder into yours.

And, damn, you wish those words didn't make you a puddle of goo. "Yeah, no, I'm gonna go with stupid," you say after a moment. "On many,  _many_  levels. Like still not knowing what the fuck I actually  _did_  or whether it killed anybody. A sacrifice is always demanded, right?"

She rubs her hands together and hides them in her armpits. Her voice is gentle when she whispers, "Like I said, brave."

And you don't say another word to her until the orange lights of Daramount's room greet you from one of the towers, until the guards patrolling the courtyard almost catch you, until the Academy stands once again tall and mighty against the sky—just as it had when you'd left to go search for the lab, which Casey still hasn't seen because of reasons that you'll look for  _after_  you've gotten some decent shuteye.

(And when you return to your room as quietly as you can, when you inhale the smell of stale Cheetos and unwashed socks as though it were the essence of life itself, when Ike stirs from his beauty sleep and waltzes to the bathroom, and you pull him into a giant bearhug that you'll claim was his ridiculous dream the next morning—everything is, against all odds, back to normal.)

 

 

_a dying scream makes no sound / the walls are shaking when you're touching me / and all the roads we have to walk are winding, and all the lights that lead us there are blinding; there are many things that i would like to say to you, but i don't know how_

* * *

 

**iii.**

A trio of brilliant white flecks melt on the back of your palm. "Well,  _that's_  different," you mutter, kneeling in your shorts and a  _What The Fett?_  shirt over a field stretching bright and cold as far as the eye can see. (At least you're not wearing sandals. That'd have been horrible.)

A string of indiscernible sounds reach you from above; you glance up to see a golden head whipping back and forth between the approaching flurry of floating flakes and the vibrant, humid jungle seven feet behind her. "Buh— Wha—  _How?_ " she manages with a finger in the air, but it seems that you're the only one intrigued this time; she just looks  _offended_.

"What's the matter, Casey—haven't you ever seen snow before?"

You grin, feeling your weirdly sharp canines show, when she swerves to scowl at you. "I'm from Chicago, not Tallahassee," she says. "Don't turn this into a joke, Hunter."

"Why not?" You shrug easily. "Might make it easier to deal with."

You grab a fisful of the tiny crystals and let them scatter back to the ground in bigger lumps. They glisten wetly in the sunlight, and they glue themselves together with the slightest of pressure, and they become virtually  _solid_  when you smush them whole—as you figured they would, because the air doesn't feel  _nearly_  cold enough to be in the negative degrees. (Oh, sorry, "below thirty" or whatever it was. Weird Americans.)

"Do you realize what this means?" you whisper with wonder. "We could have a  _snowfight_. Right here on campus. I haven't had a snowfight in so long…" you mutter longingly, without mentioning that it's mostly the lack of partners at fault, not an absence of snow.

An involuntary chortle escapes her before she smooths out her face and does the reasonable thing. "Hunter, that's not really—"

"Oh, wait, hold on—someone's texting me."

You pull out the very same iPhone that had gotten busted on your first night here. You can't play games or write stuff, or do  _anything_ , really, in the lower part of the screen, but it still does a pretty good job of displaying things. Deep down, despite the inconvenience, you kinda  _dig_  the crack. It looks like shattered glass and window frost simultaneously, and it's is basically a really cool one-of-a-kind cover. That… you can't take off. Fine, it  _sucks_.

The fact that you can now once again send and receive texts doesn't, though. Even if you wake up every day not knowing whether it'll still work in the evening, for now the makeshift cell tower Esi, Hannah, and Ian built while everyone else was preparing their science fair projects works like a charm. And the faculty doesn't have a  _clue_.

The whole thing makes you feel very  _Ferris Bueller_. (Although you usually restrict your godawful singing to showers and moments of true ecstasy—which are  _not_  one and the same, despite what certain roommates of yours might imply on a daily basis—so you'd prefer to skip the really awesome musical number for no apparent reason.)

"It's Jade." Your eyes rush over the letters, a snort bubbling up your throat, and, by the time you get to the attached picture, you've fallen over your butt from laughing, right into the snow. "You're not gonna believe this," you say through choking on the ice that flies into your open mouth.

"Given that Ike's with her and could've easily 'borrowed' her phone—no, I probably won't," she agrees. "What is it?"

You push yourself upright, lamenting your suddenly wet shorts; your butt's cold now. "Get this: apparently they stumbled upon snow in the east quadrant, too, and Ike was being a pissbaby with the cigarette lighter—Jade's words, not mine—and it lit up. Not the cigarette," you correct quickly. "The  _snow_." You hold the phone out at her; she snatches it out of your hands. "The snow is  _flammable_ , Casey."

"No, that's— That could be gasoline," she says, eyes glued to the picture. Her head drifts to the side. "Although it's not spreading like… Uh… I mean, it's—"

"This place is fucking  _incredible_ ," you mutter, not quite sure whether you're simply beyond caring or legitimately astounded.

And as you begin to wish you had a set of matches too, just to see it with your own eyes, as you chastise yourself for the thought of consciously messing with unknown, potentially dangerous properties without preparation of any kind, as you wonder whether it holds  _other_  unexpected qualities—like externally absorbed poison, or ability to brainwash, maybe—Casey squints at the phone for about two straight minutes while declining snowflakes dance around her. "I quit physics," she finally declares with a brush of her hair out of her face after handing you back the phone. "I'm just. I'm done."

You spring to your feet and make a show of brushing your butt clean of frost. "No, you're not," you say, as plainly as if she'd just suggested that aliens don't exist.

"Oh, I most  _certainly_  am," she argues. "Flammable snow, Hunter? That goes against  _everything_  I've ever been taught."

"So?" You shrug. Her stony demeanor doesn't budge. "Casey, come  _on_ , that's a load of shit and you know it. Fine, fine, you're intimidated and maybe a little scared, but don't deny that you also have a burning—ha ha—need to figure this out ahead of everyone else," you declare. "You're probably the first genius to ever come across this thing—or at least one of very, very few. None of whom have shared whatever discoveries they may or may not have had with the general public. This could  _literally_  change the way humanity looks at science  _forever_ , and the one who changes it would be the next Newton, probably," you say, ruffling your own hair to rid it of snow. " _You're_  the one who came here on a dating moratorium, ranking first in her class, may I remind you—you can't fucking tell me that you don't want to be that person."

"I'm competitive, yes, but—"

" _But_  you also want to know everything about how the universe works," you add, amused that you  _actually_  have to explain this to her. "Because only by truly understanding it can you manipulate it into a favorable outcome—and you're a chess player if I ever saw one." You kick a sneaker against the other to get the snow off, though they're wet beyond belief at this point.  _Would Nine treat you for pneumonia_ , you wonder idly. "If I know you, this might just be the most exciting thing that's happened since we got here, even without the hypothetical accolades."

Casey crosses her hoodied arms and kicks some snow with the point of her shoe, shrinking into herself. Her skin takes on a silver-like tint against the background of white and gray; she's even more beautiful here than in the bustling colorful chaos of your everyday lives. "Guess you  _do_  know me," she mutters at last, lips tugging up as she shakes her hair to get a flurry of snow out.

"Heh. It's just one of the things I really lo— like about you," you say. "How you never back down."

"Well, I'm gonna  _today_ ," she says with a huff, but you can already see her thoughts racing. "We're not dressed for this kind of weather, and any samples we take would just melt after two minutes. I wanna take Vanessa out here, see what she can make of it; who knows, maybe her mom can help as well." She looks around, lip bitten in thought. "Isabel, too, if she's up for it."

"Hah, I wouldn't count on it," you say, hands stuffed into pockets while a breeze rustles the peaceful clearing.

Her shoulders sag. "Look, I know she's not ready to totally betray the Academy and shit, but if there's one thing she's never been able to resist, it's besting me at something.  _Trust me_ , she'll want to be in on this—it's just a question of whether she'll blow the whistle or not."

"Whatever you say," you drawl, rubbing your bare arms. "Actually, now that you mention deficient clothing—that thing about going back to the jungle, where it's warm? Yeah, I'm game for that right about now," you say and wipe your nose with the back of your hand. "Let's go."

But she doesn't say anything, and you don't hear her lithe feet following behind, and you've barely had enough time to turn away and take a single step and start to wonder whether something's wrong—when something hard and fluffy and cold hits the back of your head.

That same something falls down your neck, drips behind your collar. "Was that…? Did you just—?" You drag fingers through hair that hasn't had a trim in too long as you turn back around; they come back chilled. "Oh my god."

She's the picture of mischief—hand on waist, the other flipping a snowball in the air, hip cocked—as you stare, dumbstruck. "So, cowboy, what's it gonna be?" A smirk buds, uneven and daring, and suddenly she reminds you  _so much_  of that girl you'd heard had been cast in  _Game of Thrones_  just before you'd left the real world behind.

(Natalie… Something. You've definitely seen her in something else, and it's on the tip of your tongue, but Casey is  _practically offering up a snowball fight on a silver platter_  and that is the  _one thing in life your endless loop of fuckups can't ruin_ , and like  _hell_  are you gonna waste precious time trying to remember what it was, when you could be doing something you love that you haven't gotten to do since before your mother's condition worsened.)

"Come at me," she beckons. Her voice is low and dark, almost seductive in its playfulness, but there is no doubt in you, when you look into her eyes—she's about to go  _bananas_  on your shit.

You pretend to think about it, inspecting your damp clothes. "Eh, what the hell—the jungle's right there, right?" And too fast for her to really see—too fast for even  _you_  to comprehend it, because for once your desperate need to impress Casey doesn't backfire—you kick up a gust of powder, grab a handful of it out of the air, and spin on your heel in a fluid motion that ends with you hurling a snowball right at your dream girl's left shoulder.

She lets out a disbelieving gasp as she brushes the snow off her chest, and you know, as she leans to the ground exactly when you do, that it's  _on_.

You're quick; she's quicker. Your aim sucks; hers doesn't. But this mysteriously flammable substance bends to your will somehow, whereas her balls often disintegrate before even hitting you, and after five minutes of yelps and freezing fingers, the only recognizable winner is snow, it seems. Your shirt looks almost as if dyed white by now; Casey's hair sheds flakes with every movement, if they haven't melted already. Your socks have filled to the brim with frost.

She stands ten paces away with ammo in each hand now, half-hidden behind one of the few birches thick enough to provide any cover at all. You do the same, hurrying to establish a base with pre-made balls behind a particularly large rock, never taking your eyes off her. The jungle rears its verdant, tempting leaves in the distance now instead of closeby.

"You ready to surrender yet?" she yells, tensing her left arm, slightly out of breath.

"As  _if_ ," you shout back. "You only want me to because I'm about to  _wreck_  your ass."

She dashes from one tree to another, thicker, too quickly for you to grab and throw anything at her. "My ass is staying  _exactly_  as good as it looks in these jeans, thank you very much." Which you can no longer see, because her new shelter is nearly wide enough to obscure her entire body.

"Somehow I don't doubt that at all," you mutter, and instantly hope it was low enough that she didn't hear. Your numb fingers gather some more ammunition from the ground; you've got a nice little pile now.

Casey pops out from behind the tree just long enough to knock one of the sphere pyramids you've built into shattered bits of dust, and ducks back behind it so that only half her sneaker is visible. The sound of her palms obnoxiously brushing against each other carries over even to you. " _Still_  think you're gonna win?" she asks in the distance.

You quickly transfer the other pyramids to the ground in the shadow of your rock; in your haste, one of them tumbles into oblivion as well, and you have to wonder whether that had been her plan all along. "Winning and losing are such  _heavy_  statements," you posit loudly, " _I_ , personally, think that they go against the nature of the sport itself.  _Fun_  is what matters!" you declare brightly, and though your teeth chatter and your shoes are soaked all the way through, you're  _having_  it.

In fact, it's the most fun you've had since… since before stepping through the Academy's doors for the first time, probably. (It's also the most comfortable you've felt around this girl since laying eyes upon her—which has  _absolutely_  nothing to do with the level of fun. Don't get any ideas.)

"So that would be a no," she concludes, and you think you hear a smile in her voice. "Good to know, Hunter. Good to know indeed."

"I believe that's pronounced 'I'm shaking in my boots, Hunter,' but okay, whatever." You glance up in the middle of making more balls; her shoe is still there, unmoved. "Hey, Casey," you call, because you've probably done enough preparation by now, "why don't you come on out and we can end this war of a thousand years and finally restore much needed peace to our two nations?"

"With pleasure," you hear directly behind you an instant before a fucking _avalanche_ hits you over the head.

You jump up; the top of your skull hits her pointed chin. "Jhee—eeesus!" You wipe cold, wet snow from your eyes, from your hair—from your  _buttcrack_ , probably. "Casey, what the fuck?!"

"Consider the war ended," she says when you whir around to gape at her—she offers up a quick, affectionate brush of your shoulder and a smirk, standing in a shoe on one foot and a  _Hello Kitty!_  sock on the other. Her hoodie doesn't have a wet spot on it. "And by the way, I'm not wearing any boots."

You can only stand there and stare at her, freezing, as your admiration of everything she is somehow only soars. "Oh, you're  _so_  gonna get it now," someone else says with your mouth before you can think better of it. You pounce on her, water splashing from strands of your hair, and knock you both down into the white. She squeals when you hurl a handful of snow down her sleeve. "Yeah, you've invoked the wrath of Hunter the Almighty now.  _Beware_."

And she tugs up your shirt and smashes a handful of slush against your abdomen, and some of it trickles into your belly button, and you shriek; and you tickle her one socked foot, and she almost kicks you in the stomach, and you've never heard that startled sound come out of her; and you jump to your feet, and she goes chasing after you through the maze of trees, and then you chase her, and sometime later the two of you are just haphazardly running around a circular clearing without aim or direction; and you snort unattractively when she tries to jump off your rock and lands on her butt in a pillow of snow, and you both have the idea to use the weird smooth old logs as snowboards down the nearby hill at roughly the same time; and you're almost positive that you'll have to spend the next three weeks in bed with a runny nose, but she has the  _fiercest_  unrestrained laugh right now, and it's the most  _beautiful_  thing you've ever heard; and eventually she ends up perched atop your back, legs hooked around your waist, her bellowing guffaw echoing through the winter forest as you try to shake her off.

And it's  _wonderful_.

Her hair whips around your face and falls into your eyes, her hands cold on your cheeks and shockingly solid against your ears—and maybe it's because of that that you don't hear the crack.

Maybe she's giggling too loudly and you're too immersed into the sound to even  _think_  about where you're going. Maybe you've both loosened up and it's nice, and this is what you both needed to avoid crumbling. Maybe your guard is down for the first time since coming to this place—and maybe that's  _okay_.

(In the bigger picture, you mean. Right now, it's really fucking  _stupid_  of you.)

First, you hear her woo transform into a scream—then feel your footing disappear— _then the fall_.

The white forest disappears up above in an instant, and all that's left is black. That's the last thing you remember before everything explodes into searing pain.

* * *

 

Your head's the last thing that hits the ground, and your eyes may have very well have popped out from their sockets by how quickly they spring open—and suddenly everything feels so sharp and dull at the same time that it couldn't  _possibly_  be your body, or your mind, or your consciousness. (For more than a few seconds, you don't recall who you are at all. It doesn't seem very important.)

Contents of your body swish around in waves of nausea, but they feel less located in your stomach and more like… right between the eyes. You briefly wonder whether humans can, theoretically speaking, barf up their own brains.

Something groans to your right. "C-Casey?" you stammer out instead of a groan of your own, like you wish you had.

"Yeah," she gasps out, and after a few deep breaths: "I'm fine."

And when you gather the willpower to shift your gaze to her, to focus in this darkness that might not be as black as it had seemed at first, she's kneeling with one calf on the ground, hair and back matted with dirt. It's a picture you've seen before; she must have rolled to break her fall—because she is Casey and  _of course_  she knows how to do that with a split second warning while practically  _wrapped_  around you.

But you're  _you_ , and you once sprained your wrist while practicing  _cursive_  of all things, and so an unintelligible noise comes out of your mouth before you manage to make it say, "That's awesome. I don't think  _I_  am, though."

You have to wonder, at this point, whether her immediate concern will ever cease to rob you of your breath—even though you've witnessed it many times; even though it's stupid on her part because it's been  _needed_  many times and she should take someone less breakable on investigative missions; even though it's just her nature, regardless of who's injured. (Even though you're not sure whether you were even breathing to begin with.)

"What hurts?" she asks, scooting over and pulling her phone out for a light.

" _Everything_ ," you groan out—a little unpleasantly, because that  _really_  seems pretty obvious to you.

Her lips tug up fondly; that sight alone is more potent than any painkiller. "Can you be a little more specific?"

"Nope, sorry, that train has left the building," you say, eyes drifting shut. Little sparks of rainbow white dance in the black, twisting and morphing into fractal shapes. It's kind of nice. Restful, even. (But they won't stay closed all the way, not when you can't even get them to focus right, and so you get stuck with a sliver of vision between your restless eyelids, half-obscured by blurry lashes.)

She sits back on the balls of her feet, breath blasting through her nose. "Okay, then—what feels like it's gonna bruise?"

"Uhhh. Back. Probably."

"Are you sure?  _Shit_ , that might not be—" Her fingers rest gingerly on your thigh. Every strained nerve in your body tenses. "Okay, Hunter, this is very important: can you move your feet?"

You muster up enough energy to frown at her. "What? Of course I can."

"Show me," she demands; you're too dazed to grasp why.

"I don't  _wanna_."

"For me?" she pleads, lip bitten ponderously. (She is  _way_  too aware of how hopelessly you are in love with her—for  _your_  good.)

And with a growling rumble, you nudge your right toe. "See?" you mutter, lips not parting all the way. Then the other. "Nothing to freak out over, all perfectly fi— OH  _FUCK!_ " The jolt of pain sends you flying sitting upright, lungs out of order. She jerks back and almost falls over. "Shit shit  _shit shit SHIT_ MOTHER OF FUCK I AM  _NOT_  FINE!"

Her hands fly out to steady you. "Okay, okay, Hunter! Calm down. Calm down. Try not to move your leg this time."

"Fuuu _uuuuuuck_." You gulp air; the darkness spins around you. Tears prickle your eyes. " _You're the one who said to!_ "

" _Yeah_ , sorry about that. But it's gonna be okay, Hunter," she says intently, barely breathing too. "Look at me, Hunter—I  _promise_  it's gonna be okay." And she's never let you down on a promise before, so you turn to gaze into her bright, intense eyes flashing like a beacon in this darkness—and your breathing steadies, and the cave stops spinning, and the escalated pain subsides. (Not all the way, or even half the way, but enough.)

She squeezes your hand between hers, strong and soft, until you stop biting your upper lip to keep from screaming. By the look on her face, it's probably bleeding where your teeth had dug into it, but you can't really tell—that sting is nothing compared to the electric shock buzzing up your leg. As soon as you fall back to the floor, still wincing and cursing but not abjectly agonized anymore, she shifts away to inspect your left foot.

Her fingers are gentle (really, they are) but even  _she_  cannot make them immaterial—and so you're pretty sure you momentarily fall asleep to drown out the the pangs of pain, because the vivid image of Mulder dressed in a Scully costume for Halloween, yelling,  _"Skepticism!"_  abruptly disappears from behind your eyelids when she says, carefully, "Hunter, uhh… I think your ankle's broken."

"Oh. Wonderful," you stammer out, and it almost doesn't sound like sarcasm.

Casey crawls back over to you, lays a palm on your forehead. It's cold and so, so soothing. "I'll get you out of this," she whispers.

"Just tell me one thing," you say, teeth starting to chatter, because you're still clad in only a wet T-shirt and snow-stained shorts, and this place is no warmer than the winter wonderland up above, except you're no longer moving and your feet are  _freezing_. "Can you see the bone? Is the bone jutting out? Am I in a gruesome horror movie?"

"No," she reassures after what might have been a snort, "I can't see the bone. I don't think it broke the skin at all; it just looks bruised and red and swollen." A brush of your damp hair. "Hunter, I'm so  _sorry_." Stones clatter somewhere nearby.

"For what?"

"Starting the fucking snowfight." There's something in her voice that you don't recognize. "You wanted to go back and I… I… And now we're trapped here," she says, "and you're injured, and it's  _cold_. I just wanted a little bit of fun before we had to…" A sigh. "It was a stupid idea."

You peek up at her, chuckle, then push yourself upright again with a grunt, declining her help. "Casey—and I mean this  _sincerely_ —it's about  _time_  you had a stupid idea." Your exaggerated gesture hits her in the shoulder, but you're pretty sure that what comes out of her is a laugh, not a whimper. "Seriously, I can't be the only one coming up with 'em in this dynamic forever—you gotta start pulling your weight  _sometime_ , young lady," you say, grinning. "This was a decent effort; I applaud you."

"That's—" Her sigh turns into a teary smile. "I don't know what to say; this is such an  _honor_. I tried my hardest, but I couldn't have done this without you." She rubs your upper arm, voice theatrically sincere. "I'd also like to thank my gym teacher and Bobby from first grade who tried to slide down a stairway on a picture book," she says, hand over her heart, nodding enthusiastically to the empty space around you. "An inspiration, he was."

"There you go," you say with an easy shrug, the pain all but forgotten. "And, hey, as far as being trapped here goes, those rocks over there look pretty sturdy. I bet you'd get out of here in less than a minute with your parkour skills."

"But  _you're_  here," she protests, all playfulness gone, as if that had never even occurred to her. "You're injured, and you can't move, and I'm  _not_  gonna fucking leave you here, cold and alone—what do you  _take_  me for?"

"Uh, someone who doesn't want to get frostbite and  _die_?" you say. "Not necessarily in that order."

At that, she eyerolls, as though what you just said were entirely unlikely—nay,  _impossible_ —and not, you know, the realistic outcome. "Neither of those things are gonna happen. To me  _or_  you."

"No? 'Cause the other option's getting help from the guards, and I gotta be honest: I'd kinda rather die than find out what Daramount does to people who go this far out of bounds," you say. "Face it: I'm doomed.  _You're_  not."

She nods and crosses her arms, all solemn, but then: "Hunter—and I mean this  _sincerely_ —quit being a pessimistic baby, because it's wigging me out. I already texted Jade, you dummy," she says, waving her phone in your face. "She's gonna get some rope and a couple other people, and be here in an hour tops."

"You texted her?  _When?_ "

"While you were sleeping," she replies sweetly.

And instead of asking her whether you managed to start snoring in that short time, you say, "I don't think I've seen that movie." (Mostly because you don't want to know that she was subjected to that horrible, horrible sound and never wants to hang out with you again.)

"It wouldn't be your thing," she assures you with a conviction that warms you up, because imagine that—Casey knowing what is and isn't your thing. Casey knowing  _you_. (Casey  _caring_  enough to know.) "Anyway, we just gotta sit tight till help comes; and no—I'm not leaving," she adds before you can say anything.

And so, as you always do after a sufficient amount of denial and inferiority that never truly feels like quite enough, you allow yourself to glee inside and bashfully mutter, "Thanks."

"Don't thank me yet—I might just ensure your death anyway." She says it so casually, as if plotting your murder were a thing she routinely sits around doing in between saving your life; you stare at her, squinting, until she catches your gaze and explains, "Dude, I never actually  _took_  First Aid. I have  _no idea_  what the heck I'm doing—all that's sitting in my brain right now is that one episode where Joey pees on Monica, and the fact that you're not supposed to let people with concussions fall asleep. Which, hey, I  _already_  screwed up!" she announces. "Possibly. … _Probably_. Are you feeling concussed, Hunter?"

"I, uh." You brush the nape of your neck. At least you still remember how to do  _that_. "What's it feel like?"

Her lips fold inward, as if you had just proven her point. She nods, once. " _I don't know_."

"Well." You rub your face; a muffled laugh escapes. "Hmm. Let's just assume that, if I've survived  _this_  long after so many life-threatening injuries, the plot wants to keep me alive for some reason or other—and I don't really see that reason being here," you add. " _Unless_ , of course, you see any ancient hieroglyphs on those walls. Are there?" You reach out to your right, touch the dirt with your fingertips. "Nope, no, just regular caved-in earth. I'm safe," you declare. "For another day, at least."

" _That's_  a different tune," she mutters, not unhappily.

"I'm slaphappy," you say easily. A pebble bumps into your ankle and a hiss comes out your nose. "For the record, though, I don't know any of this stuff either," you admit, no longer as embarrassed about it as you would've been three minutes ago. "My dad was never really big on family legacies—or me doing things, for that matter. I can tell you exactly what heart monitors beep like and what damn near everything on a blood analysis chart means, but, uh. Yeah." Your hands flop uselessly in your lap. "Probably should've paid more attention in Health class. Probably  _would've_ , if I'd known I'd be coming here," you mutter. Then, brightly: "I know knocking people unconscious in real life is really bad and not nearly as casual as action movies make it look, though!"

"That's something," she agrees with a smile, then rubs her palms together and claps them to her thighs, getting up. "Okay, come on, I gotta get you comfortable. Uhhh…" She dashes around the room-sized hole, inspecting the very rocks you'd suggested she climb out of here, then pushes one of them over to you. At one point her hand slips and she nearly falls onto it. "There; how's that?" she asks after placing it behind your back.

You lean against it, and your every muscle loosens gratefully. "Um. Great, thanks."

"We don't want you falling asleep, now do we," she says, plopping down next to you, almost uncomfortably close. "Figured you wouldn't want to lay down like that. Okay, next step: warming you up. At least a little bit." As she speaks, her fingers clumsily start unzipping her hoodie.

"Casey, whoa—"

"Relax, you need this more than I do," she says, slipping out of it, and you want to punch yourself for that not being your immediate first thought. "I have long sleeves under this, see?" She practically pushes her clothed wrist into your face. "Plus you're kind of in mortal peril, and this somehow didn't get wet in all that chaos, unlike all of  _you_. Which—yes—totally my fault. Again," she says. "Here."

Your gaze darts between her face and the outstretched garment a number of times before you finally give in and begrudgingly take it—unable to put a name to the reluctance except for the fact that it'll unquestionably fit. It's blue and soft, and it reminds you of her eyes somehow. It's also still warm, and that's when you realize that you're still shivering and your breath's coming out white.

(It smells like her.)

You're just about to stuff one arm into a sleeve when she interrupts: "Ba-pa-pa—you need to take your shirt off first."

"What?  _Why_?"

"'Cause otherwise my hoodie will get wet too, and wet clothes are useless in retaining heat," she says. "Always better to have a thin dry layer than a thick wet one. Thermodynamics," she announces, then smiles. "Or just common sense. Whichever you prefer."

You let out something that might be a grunt, but might also be a word in Icelandic. "…I'm not really that cold." You push it away.

"Hunter, your lips are turning blue," she says with a slight chuckle, "and this place might just cave in  _again_  from how hard you're vibrating right now. Just take off the shirt." She hands it back to you. "I won't look, if that's what you're worried about."

" _Mrgh_. Fine, okay, just… Don't laugh. Thanks," you mutter, for what seems like the thousandth time. You grab your back collar and pull it up, but the rest of the shirt sticks to your skin too much. Resentfully, you resort to tugging it up from the hem cross-armed, like you've seen girls do. "When did  _you_  become so mothering?"

"Hah. Who knows. Maybe a past life is showing through."

You drag the wet, cold fabric over your head with reasonably steady movements, under the circumstances—but you've never really done this before and your limbs tangle together awkwardly, and so the shirt gets stuck halfway up your neck, your arms dangling out a tight, adhesive cylinder from the elbows. "Casey, help," you whimper.

"Oh my  _god_ ," you hear her utter through a laugh before warm, capable hands grab onto the fabric and free you from the shackles. It's a cacophony of groans and giggles, neither category entirely hers or yours, and a chunk of your hair almost gets ripped out. "Sorry— Stay still," she utters, then hooks her fingers under the simple collar with some difficulty. "Jesus, Hunter, how small  _is_  this thing?"

Through it all, she's close—towering over you on her knees, chest nearly bumping into your face—but somehow it doesn't fluster you, not even a little. Maybe you've been through too much already today; maybe the two of you have in recent hours taken an irreversible step forward where these kinds of reactions are normal. Whichever way, it's only when you get your vision back and the shirt lies crumpled on the dirty floor and she lays her hands on your bare shoulders with the strangest look on her face that you realize Casey Blevins was just technically  _undressing_  you.

The world slows down, though it hadn't been particularly fast to begin with, as she looks at you—her hands ghosting over your skin until they find a home on the back of your neck, some of the fingertips winding through your hair. You can feel her breath on your nose, her knee against your thigh, and suddenly,  _inexplicably_ , everything turns hot and tingly—it doesn't matter that you're twice as naked as you'd been when you were freezing. (You might  _still_  be freezing and simply too numb to feel it, but when you swear that her face is getting closer by the second, it doesn't feel like it—doesn't feel like there's anything in the world but  _warmth_ , delirious and perhaps slightly scorching.)

You can't look away, can't even  _blink_  as the heat coming off her skin lights up your own more and more; your heart must be filling up your entire ribcage with its haphazard beating in all directions. Her teeth sink into her lip, maybe to keep from saying something; her hair tickles against your cheek now. You're not sure you're breathing.

And then your noses bump together; and she blinks, and the curtain drops.

Whatever was in her gaze is gone now, and the moment shifts—but it doesn't end. Instead of doing something else, something she might regret tomorrow or the day after that, Casey rests her forehead against yours and inhales deeply, eyes closed. Your stomach jumps upside down for a single instant in what might be disappointment but might also be relief—or maybe concussed nausea—before you find the courage to lay your palms lightly upon her shoulders.

She holds you there, bone pressing against bone, fingers tightening in your hair, as she sinks back down to your level. A shaky sigh hits your lips. You think you feel something wet touch your cheek, but it's too cold to tell and not important enough to disrupt this strange peace. Finally, she whispers, "You're gonna be fine, Hunter."

You don't know whom she's trying to reassure.

And as she releases you, as you finally put on the sweater that's lost all of her heat but nevertheless feels like heaven, you wonder whether you truly will be, and how long that state will last. There are so many unsaid things between the two of you, so much you're scared of never telling her. When will these borrowed chances run out? Will you get a warning before it is, for once, too late?

Casey sits back down next to you, hip to hip, head to head, and puts an arm over your shoulder, rubbing slightly. You do the same, though your touch is far more tentative. Her knees draw up, held to her by the other arm; slowly, a bit of heat returns to your body where it touches her.

Seconds and minutes pass as you wait to remember what warmth is, and then her fingers are on the side of your hooded head, nudging it gently down. You want to resist, want to stay strong amid the ruins where boundaries you'd thought were unbreakable once stood, but you're still in pain, and you're still cold, and she feels, against all odds, like coming home sometimes—and you're this close to never having a home again—so you lay your head on her shoulder and allow yourself to be happy about it, for just a little bit.

She is quiet yet so vivid and intense as her fingers brush through your hair; you just want to tell her everything that has lingered on the tip of your tongue for so long. She has to know some of it by now—she must have known it  _always_ —but something inside you screams to voice it all in tangible words instead of looks and unsaid whispers and the doing of stupid things where they really aren't necessary.

You'd think this would be the perfect moment, with time stretching out before you and nothing to do but talk, no interruptions or distractions—but minutes pass, and you don't say anything, and eventually she starts playing  _Twenty Questions_  without first asking you whether you want to, just assuming you have a word ready—and, somewhere along the way, you decide to trust her.

It's not something that comes easily to you, not something you make a habit of doing, since you've never been able to trust yourself about  _anything_ —but, in that moment, you accept without question that she  _will_  get you out of this and into Nine's office, where you'd somehow known you'd end up before nightfall when you got dressed this morning.

You  _believe_  her when she rambles off soothing nothings at jolts of your pain, and you let yourself be _convinced_ that this is nothing to worry about, and you  _choose_  to have faith that you will have another chance to tell her, and another, and another—because what kind of story would it be where the sidekick dies before voicing the things that would make his death tragic instead of amusing?

"I'm gonna be fine," you whisper to yourself as the sounds of Jade and Ike bickering reach you from the distance above.

 

 

_we're too busy dancing to get knocked off our feet / cold smoke seeping out of colder throats, darkness falling leaves nowhere to go / come on, come on, move a little closer, come on, come on, i wanna hear you whisper_

* * *

 

**iv.**

"Shit," she whispers, tugging on your sleeve. "Shit, someone's coming."

You hastily shove the files you were cataloguing back into their folders. " _What?_  I thought night patrol was over already." The candle stolen from Jade burns your fingers as you put its fire out. (Ahh,  _ahh_ , there's smoke. It smells, and it sizzles gray in the dim moonlight. You huff, puff, and wave your arms around like a clumsy chicken. Stupid smoke. Stupid invisible ink. Stupid flashlights that can't replicate candlelight. You're gonna be  _so fucked_.)

"Shh." She peeks through the door's window out into the classroom as you frantically search for hiding places. Tiny filing room—three walls of shelves, one chair, an unequipped murphy desk barely bigger than a brick;  _zero_  is what you come up with, let alone one big enough for the both of you. "He's talking to someone… It's not patrol. He has to… go… get something? …From here; oh,  _great_."

Your knees go weak. "Casey, there's nowhere to hide. They're gonna  _roast us alive_  for being here," you say, wondering whether trying to break a hole into a wall would be a feasible escape plan. You're only two stories up; you could jump to the ground, right?

Right?

"We're  _not_  gonna die, Hunter," she says, steel in her eyes—but the rapid pulse on her neck gives her away.

You pace a circle around her to stop from hyperventilating. "We are  _so_  gonna die."

"I thought you were supposed to be the optimist," she hisses, grabbing your hand to steady you in place.

"Yeah, well, that was before I knew how precious these people's secrets are to them," you ramble out and glance in the window. A shaky whine. "Casey, he's  _coming_."

"Okay, okay, hold on, I'm thinking." She turns away and blows out a breath. You can hear the keys jingle against the guard's hip now; it's like the  _Jaws_  theme in your ears. "There's always a way out of these things," she says. "I-If we can't hide, then—then what we need is some kind of excuse, uh, something to—" And with a sudden glint in her eye, she commands, "Get down."

You obey without question, as always. Your legs give out before you order them to, and your butt falls on what feels like a lego, and it's only when you're lying flat on the floor and she's on all fours on top of you, pulling earplugs out of her pocket, that you think to ask, "What, exactly, are we doing?"

"We're gonna kiss," she declares, swiftly putting them in and reaching to turn the lock as your eyebrows stretch up. "It's a cliched spy trope, I know, but—hey, we're fucked anyway, right? Don't stop until I do," she orders.

"Won't be a problem," is all you have time to gasp out before she leans down and your thoughts blank out entirely, because of all the ways you pictured this night going, kissing Casey wasn't on the list. It's  _never_  been on the list. You didn't practice, or make bullet point lists, or do a confidence speech in the mirror. You—

You think you see her lips twitch into a smile just before they lower out of sight, and then she pauses, an inch away, gaze on yours. It's a strange few seconds after this blur of terror and chaos; time seems to slow impossibly, to stretch out so clearly as she stares at you, her breath warming your skin. Your heart leaps up at her with every beat—which spread so far apart as you notice  _just_  how many tendrils of white grace her vivid eyes in this new eternity—it rises toward her periodically, deeply, even when you know the rest of you must be filling with heat and anxiety.

Then the approaching steps jolt you back to reality, and time returns to its usual speed, and you nod shakily.

That's all the the prompting she needs, and a blink later her mouth is pressed lightly to yours. Something within you instantly soars—despite the fear, despite it not being real. When she starts to move against you, the breath you hadn't realized you'd been holding comes out tinged with gold. Air pulls taut around you, it seems, but it doesn't close in—only cradles somehow.

This _is_  real.

You begin dancing along to the rhythm she's set, slowly, cautiously—and you're not sure how, or when, or why, but suddenly your fingers are twisted in her hair, and your breath comes out ragged, and both of your lips are fumbling against each other quicker than your heartbeat. A key scruffs into a lock somewhere in the distance. Her body slides up yours in a way that feels distinctly  _not_  part of the plan, and maybe it's  _that_  that gives you the courage to follow through on your every instinct and drag your teeth over her lower lip.

It's a lot of maybes, a lot of questions, and not a single ounce of you cares about making sense of any of it. Just as long as this moment of her in your arms lasts forever, none of that other shit matters. You keep kissing her with all you have, as though your life depended on it—and you only vaguely remember that it genuinely does, when the grouchy, masculine, "Hey," reaches your right ear—because this might be the best thing that's ever happened to you and there's a very good chance it will never happen again.

" _Hey,_ " he barks again, louder now. It's a good thing that you're not the one who's supposed to pull away, because you're not sure you could. She is heat and passion atop you, and with every moment you think, somewhere in the back of your head that can still form semi-coherent thoughts, that it couldn't possibly get any better than this, the next one rises above it. As her fingers intertwine tightly with yours to the left of your head and her tongue swipes over the curve of your bottom lip, a natural curiosity overcomes you over how high this could possibly go.

But the third, " _Hey!_ " comes alongside a hard poke at the both of you, and, with a yelp, Casey breaks away from your mouth, scrambling to get off your body and face the man glaring at you from the doorway. You fall back, dazed and breathless, as she takes the earplugs out with a startled expression. ( _What were they even for,_  you wonder.)

"Oh, I'm sorry, hi," she gasps out with feigned innocence and a nonchalant wipe of her mouth. It's pink. "Did someone need to use the room? It was just so loud out there; I couldn't concentrate in that chaos." She gestures to the cotton in her lap. "We can just go back out and be out of your way, sir."

His mouth sets into a frown as he once-overs you. "There's no one out there; now get your asses over to processing."

You watch—with a different branch of that same curiosity—as Casey's face turns to momentary horror. "Oh no, did the bell ring already? No,  _no_ , Mr. Riley will have my  _head_ ; how long have we been in here?" She grabs your hand, pretends to inspect your watch. "Dammit, Hunter, when will you get this thing  _fixed_  already? No wonder you're always late," she mutters and turns back to the guard, haphazardly dragging her hand through her hair. "Could you please tell me the time? I really want to make it to Miss Richmond's presentation, and I'm supposed to work on my project before then, and—"

"Miss Blevins, that event ended two hours ago."

Her mid-sentence expression clears and freezes. " _What?!_ " she shrieks, and, it is in that exact moment, still chasing the breath that she kissed out of you, that you become certain, without even the  _shadow_  of a doubt, that you're in love Casey Blevins—unconditionally, completely, incomprehensibly. That you love everything she is, in every possible meaning of the word known or unknown to man.

"Miss, that's—"

"No, no… Did someone move it up the schedule without telling me?" she demands, then nods with flared nostrils. " _Oh,_  I bet it was that bitch Isabel. She'll do fucking  _anything_  to spite me."

" _Hey!_ " the man roars. "No one moved anything! It's almost  _midnight_."

And you'll never be sure whether your eyes are fooling you then or if she's just that good, but you could swear she visibly pales. "You're joking," she whispers.

"'Fraid not, miss, and you're violating curfew."

"No, no! I mean, how?!" She grabs the guard's watch and lets out a shaky gasp. "We  _can't_  have been here for three and a half hours. I mean. That's  _insane_. That's insane, right?" Then she turns toward you and slaps your upper arm with the back of her hand. "Hunter, what the fuck?"

"Whoa, what are you looking at  _me_  for?" you sputter. "It's not like I can speed up time."

"Well, maybe if you weren't such a good  _kisser_ ," she says, as if it were obvious, "we wouldn't have lost  _track_  of it." Her head falls into her hands with a sigh. "Oh, god, this is  _such_  a trainwreck of a day."

"Hey, you just said I was a good kisser," you object, shooting in the dark. She spares you a frustrated glare, but behind her back, a thumbs up.

"I just. Mrgh," she says and looks up at the guard again. " _Please_  don't throw us into the dungeons. I can't fall behind on my studies again; I have to prepare for the—" Another panicked breath. "Man, I  _swear_  I'll just go right to bed and, and, and, not make out with…  _anyone_. For a week. Or a month; whatever. And  _definitely_  not during prep sessions for this competition; that was a bad call." Another glare at you. "Please, we didn't mean to do anything wrong. It just—" Vague helpless gesture with her hands. "I mean, haven't you ever kissed anyone?"

And that's, finally, when his features soften. "Hmph. I  _guess_  I can see how you'd forget other things, the way you were goin' at it just now." Your ears fill to the brim with heat at that description, but it only seems to encourage him. "How long've you two been together, then?"

"Barely a week," you supply with a bashful grin and a sideways glance at her. "Can't seem to think about anything else, really."

"Ah, yes, young love," he mutters wisely. "I remember the first month with my wife. Magical time." His gaze roams over the both of you in the sharp silence—and when he looks right into your eyes, all dark and heartless and evil, you swear your spine almost  _physically_  snaps. "Don't waste it," he advises after a moment, then steps aside. "But if I ever catch either of you  _again_ —"

Casey practically jumps up to her feet in one go. "Yes, yes, thank you, thank you!" She grabs his hand between her own and clutches it to her chest. "You  _literally_  just saved my life.  _Thank you_. Come on, Hunter, let's get out of here."

You mutter a hasty, "Thanks," over your shoulder as she drags you out of there, and the guard makes a sound that somehow manages to remind you of  _both_  Gandalf's, "Fly, you fools!" and that bit in Scooby-Doo where meddling kids inevitably get bitterly trash-talked—and then both of you run, run,  _run_  through the dark, empty halls until, finally, the wall between your two doors graces your vision.

A grateful moan escapes one of you—maybe both. You spread your arms as wide as they will go and hug the bland wallpaper as though it were your dearest friend; a loud smooch follows, and then you don't even  _pretend_  to not collapse against it, heaving like a madman. She remains upright, but you can see her chest pumping rapidly as both of you try to recover.

"Holy shit, I can't believe that  _worked_ ," you say much, much later, when the capacity for speech has returned to your lungs. Then, brightly: "This changes  _everything_."

She lets out a breathless giggle and sinks against the wall, too. "Sorry to burst your trope application bubble, Hunter, but the kissing was just a setup for the  _real_  con," she points out. "You don't really strike me as a con man—although that was an  _impressive_  attempt."

"Well, yeah, I mean, I know, but  _still_. It  _worked_. Let's just let that sink in," you urge, gesturing wildly. "It worked. Because of you. You're  _amazing_ , Casey," you say earnestly.

She only smiles to herself. "Did you manage to salvage the notes, at least?"

"What? Oh, uh—" You pat your pockets, sigh in relief when they crunch. "Yeah, it's all here. I'll give them to Andres first thing in the morning."

"Good," she says and rests her head against the wall, looking at the ceiling. "We didn't shave two years off our lives for nothing, then." Her fingers brush back her sweaty hair. "That was a really close call—a lot more intimate than I'm comfortable with. We need to be more careful next time."

"No arguments here," you say, even though a part of you is thankful—your chest swells with joy at the memory of the dance between your mouths.

She slips off her kitten heels and loosens her tie as your rub your shaking palms together to get the heat circulating again. Neither of you say anything—not then and not when the sweat on your faces has dried—and as the minutes tick by and your heartbeat slows, you begin to realize just how  _exhausted_  you are. But when you grunt and squint your eyes, and get up to leave, Casey says, too quickly, "Hunter, wait. There's one more thing."

"What?"

"I was just thinking…" She sighs. "That guard obviously knew who I was. I mean, it's not really like most people here have a  _choice_  in that, what with the campaign and such, but, uh—" Another hard breath. "Anyway, he probably also knew  _you_ , or at least could find out who you are if he wanted to. What I'm saying is… I'm not that convinced he's gonna keep us, uh, 'dating' to himself."

"That's… a good point, actually," you say, feeling your face scrunch up. "Daramount probably knows  _already_."

"Exactly." She gestures matter-of-factly, then claps her hands together. "So… it'd be kind of weird if one night we said we were, like, crazy in love or whatever, and then went and barely  _talked_  for the next month, right?" she says, straightening against the wall. Her hands link in her lap. "I think we need to put on a show for at least a little while longer. Maybe not as, uh,  _graphic_ ," she says with a chuckle, "but, um…"

"Oh! Uh… Oh." You shrug, for lack of anything else to do. "Yeah, I guess."

And she gets a look in her eye, then, a look that you're becoming increasingly familiar with—it usually brings both brilliance and trouble along. "Wait, now that I think about it… That could actually be a good  _cover_ ," she realizes. "In the long term. I mean, we want them to think we're not plotting anything against them; what better way than to look like we spend all our time thinking about each other and making out, right? New relationships are often all-consuming and take up a lot of time and energy," she reasons, the nail of her thumb bitten in thought.

"Uh… right. Yeah."

"We could… Oh, we could go on 'dates' to sites we want to investigate, and—and slip notes without suspicion... and whenever we're caught somewhere we're not supposed to be, we just say we wanted to have some alone time away from our obnoxious roommates," she proposes, clapping a hand against her thigh. "Hunter, this is— It's kind of perfect. Isn't it?" she asks, turning to face you. "I mean, what do you say? Are you on board?"

And you can see it now.

You'd tell her yes without even thinking about it because being around Casey for whatever reason is the greatest offer you've ever heard, and if you can do it to get answers, then that's even better. And in the weeks and months that would follow, you would simply nod to the door and no one would question it when both of you left; you would run your fingers through her hair or brush the back of your hand against hers, and she wouldn't flinch away but, more likely, return the favor; you would spend minutes and hours and days trying to make her laugh, just to see that glint of unrestricted joy that you've always treasured in her, and when she asks why, you'd say it's what couples do.

And sometimes, when you've gone too long without having someone stumble upon you making out and complain to all their friends about the lack of peace and quiet in this school, you would hold her close and kiss her with the very best that you have to offer—and it would be real, then. In those precious few moments, though they may have been brought on by necessity, the masks and pretenses would fall off and you'd be together with the girl you've come to love, and the connection between you would send electricity down your limbs, and that feeling could never be taken away, not by any device of torture or brainwash.

It hadn't been purely an act for her tonight, and it wouldn't be then. Of all the ways you've always been quick to doubt whatever interest in you she has, you  _know_  that it hadn't been an act. Not completely—not even mostly. You know that if things were different, maybe it wouldn't be one at all.

And maybe, just maybe, over time, pretending to do all those things she had once said she didn't have the time for would grow less appealing than actually  _doing_  them—with you. Maybe she'd roll over one night while you were pretending to look at the stars and instead plotted an escape route, and she'd tell you she wants to do this thing for real. Maybe she'd go carpe diem on  _your_  ass, now that you know each other better, and she'd have known all along that you've never been able to truly separate your feelings from the  _awful_  mission of being her boyfriend—that she just has to join in on the party.

Maybe… Maybe you wouldn't believe her if she ever told you she loved you for real, because you'd still wonder whether she was pretending. Maybe you'd see just how good of an actress she is and never trust anything she says, or does, or is ever again. Maybe you'd confuse her displays of affection—that ruffle of your hair, the kiss on the cheek, the smile at something dumb you've said—for something she had never intended them to be. Maybe you'd grow bitter over hoping that that shift would happen, over life never bending to your will—grow into someone you never wanted to be.

Maybe you'd see what it would be like, this thing that you want with all your little heart, and being so close to it yet not close enough would be unbearable. Maybe having the forgery would hurt worse than having nothing at all. It's one thing to give yourself unconditionally to her without even the thought of getting anything back, but a shred of hope for something else can poison even the purest of intentions.

And one way or another, you would break. That's what you see. That's all there's ever been.

Every tiniest fiber of your being wants to say yes, to  _jump_  at the opportunity to tell her all the things you've wanted to tell her for so long just for the sake of saying them aloud—even under the pretense of not meaning any of it—and so instead you make a face and what comes out of your mouth is, "…I don't really think that's a good idea."

Fueled by your deepest imagination, no doubt, you think you see her face fall just slightly. "You don't?"

"I mean, I agree about the keeping it up for a few days until we stage a breakup or something," you say. "That sounds like the reasonable, careful thing to do—but not as, like, a permanent solution. I'm just not that good of an actor," you add with a nervous laugh. A hand flies to the nape of your neck. "Secrets! Now  _those_  I can keep. But telling outright lies— _not_  my strong suit," you say with half of an eyeroll, and because you're an idiot, you can't help adding, "And let's face it: you and me together for more than a week is a bit of a stretch anyway, isn't it?"

Her head darts to the side and her teeth sink into her lip as she plays with her fingers, and you abruptly remember what it had felt like when your own were biting there. Your eyes refuse to look away from that soft, slightly chapped sight, and you want more than anything to step forward and do it all over again; and it's a dangerous thing—this new knowledge that's no longer a wild fantasy. How will you ever look at her and forget it?

"Yeah, you're probably right," she admits after a moment. "It'd be an emotional toll and a hard pretense to keep up. And neither of us would be able to pursue other relationships in the meantime," she says, as though either of you were  _interested_  in any, "and the faculty would inevitably catch on sooner or later, at which point the punishment would probably be a lot more severe." Her frown deepens. "Now that I think about it, they'd probably have ways to forbid us from seeing each other even before they find out the truth, if they thought us being together would interfere with our performance or their plans."

"That's probably a thing they can do," you agree, all lamely. "And yeah, that's also pretty much what I meant. All very good points."

She nods slightly. "I'm good at points," she says, voice drifting between a deadpan and awkward sincerity. Her arms cross. "So we're in agreement, then? We date publicly for a few days, and then…"

"Yeah, that sounds good," you say—even though it really doesn't and you can't figure out what you want it to be instead. "Library at lunch? We can pin the details down then."

"I'll see you there," she agrees, friendly as ever, as if tonight were like any other. But when you turn away again, right as you're about to take the first step to your room, her quiet voice betrays something else. "For what it's worth, though… You really  _are_  a good kisser," she says softly.

You let the words take root in your heart and spread outward—through every cell and every vein, until the very cuticles of your toes warm from their meaning—before gently laying your hand upon the doorknob. You stare at it, not her, when you say, "Goodnight, Casey."

She sighs faintly and chuckles to herself, and you'll lie awake in five minutes wondering what it is that she had found so funny. "Goodnight, Hunter."

* * *

 

(And four days later, with her breakup kiss still fresh on your lips, with her parting words still cutting at you though they were not meant to, with the skin of your lap still acutely remembering the weight of her pressing down on it in the cafeteria, you lie in your bed, reveling in the ache coursing through you. How  _terrible_  it is to miss something you never had—so peculiar a feeling, yet no less wretched for it.

You flip through your music library, questing aimlessly for something that would mend this wound that has no discernible shape. You don't expect to find anything, not really, pushing the small buttons faster than your eyes can comprehend the letters—but somehow you do anyway. You get lost staring at this title, and you recite the lyrics to yourself over and over and over; the back of your neck starts to prickle with tears as you chuckle humorlessly. It's a completely different context, the last song you should ever relate to, and yet you wonder, as the first one rolls to the bridge of your nose and drips onto the pillow… It started out with a kiss;  _how_  did it end up like this?)

(How the  _fuck_  did it end up like this?)

 

 

_we hadn't seen each other in a month when you said you needed space / we should just kiss like real people do / two feet standing on a principle, two hands longing for each other's warmth_

* * *

 

**v.**

(She had said, in words different and not quite as direct, that crafting a shield of false love and oblivion would be the smart way to protect yourselves. It had made sense, then, and sometimes, when the sky lights up with glitter and your mind won't shut off, you wonder where you'd be now if you'd been just a tad smarter. If perhaps you'd doomed yourself—and her, and everyone else—in some larger scheme you were too close to, or too blind to see.)

It's five weeks later when Casey shows up at your door and—through elaborate ruses and motionless pleas to trust her that might just be your imagination—leads you on a hunt for some "borrowed book" all over the school while the two of you bicker, like exes are supposed to. A month during which you've spoken about twenty-two words to each other—one week to sell the breakup, another after your appendix burst, one more when she'd gone on a field trip with Mr. N and five other students to learn about the temples, and the last two because she's barely been talking to  _anyone_  upon coming back.

She stops at one of the Academy's many greenhouses after nearly an hour of borderline aimless walking, and as soon as you get there, she puts her recording of ambient wind on speaker. And then she takes a deep breath and avoids your gaze, as if she's about to tell you the biggest, most horrible secret in the known history of humankind—so what you prepare yourself to hear, when she finally tucks a lock of hair behind her ear and looks you in the eye, is something a great deal more important and a  _lot_  less terrifying than, "I want to be with you."

"…I, uh." You must have heard wrong. Must have misunderstood. "Sorry?"

(And now she says, in words different and not quite as succinct, that bonds are not smart, that shoving more ammunition at them is not  _smart_ , and that her heart and her soul are only on the table as long the table itself is hidden completely. What everyone else saw would still be a lie, she says, but this time  _the truth_  would be the important part—and so  _this time_ , when she asks whether you're game, instead of saying yes or no or anything in between, you slowly cross the distance separating you, lay a shaking but sure palm gently upon her cheek as though you were cradling the universe itself, and  _kiss_  her with all the love that you have to offer.)

* * *

 

 _(Seven minutes earlier, when you wouldn't stop asking questions—because none of this can be real, because it has to be a ruse or a prank or a dream—it comes out of her in half a scream, half a plea: "Hunter, they killed my_ parents _!"_

_You stare at her, arm slackened at your side. "What?"_

_She draws back almost instantly, hugging herself, and scrutinizes her feet with a hard swallow; you wonder whether she had meant to say anything all. (Somehow, though this is not about you, though you should be_ ashamed _of yourself, the thought finds a way to cut you.)_

" _The day we got here." And though her actual words only sound a little forced out, the utter pain in her voice sucks heat out of the air around you anyway—out of empathy now instead of your own hurt_. _"I kissed my mom goodbye that morning and hugged my dad at the airport, and ten hours later Pamela led me to their dead, tortured bodies in the basement." Not just agony now—anger, too._

" _C-Casey," you gasp out. Nearly six months she's kept this in. Six months without anyone knowing. Your hands don't know what to do;_ you _don't know what to do. As much as your own parental death had taken you by surprise, it also hadn't. (Funny how she might have gotten more of a goodbye than you ever did.) "Why didn't you tell us? We could've—"_

" _I thought it was best." Her tone cuts off all further discussion. "I didn't— I didn't think they'd do it again."_

_There's a sledgehammer pounding at your chest from her somber eyes, burrowing right toward your heart. You'd never thought it was possible to feel this much in someone else's stead. You almost reach out to her, to hold her, to soothe her. (Almost.) "What do you— What'd'you mean?" you stammer out through the waves of cold rushing over you. "Like, kill them twice? H-How is that possible?"_

" _Not my parents," she whispers, clutching her stomach. "Other people I love. That they took from me."_

_And for a moment she looks so much older, like your kindergarten teachers whom you had known to be still young, in grander terms than those of yours, but whose smiles had already boasted wrinkles of experience and voices—the cadence of wiseness. Then it fades, a beat before she opens her mouth again, and she's back to being just Casey—stick legs, smooth skin sprinkled with freckles whenever the sun comes out for more than two days, bottom lip always reddishly sore in at least one place where she's chewed the skin off._

_And she's more undone than you've ever seen her. (Than she's ever_ let _you see.)_

" _Casey, what happened?" you ask. "Who did they take?"_

" _It's… complicated," she says, as though she didn't simply not want to talk about it, but genuinely doesn't possess the words. "I just… I know what happened to me the day of the woodrun. What I did… and went through."_

" _Really?" You mean to sound relieved and interested. The doubt that slips out does so without your permission; you scratch the skin at the back of your neck when she glances at you. "Um, no, it's just, uh… Jade—the one from the future—said that what the cylinder would demand of you would… go beyond words, I think was her phrasing. But you only ever seemed to have amnesia about it," you explain, shoulders tugging up. "So those memories had to have been really important, right? I mean, did you really get them back so easily?" (And under your breath, you mutter, "Maybe it's false implants. Brainwash." Maybe she doesn't need to be in pain.)_

 _Her smile is rueful but tinged with fondness. "It took a great deal more than a few hours' worth of memories, Hunter—and no, I didn't get them back," she says, picking at her nails. "More like I… saw a documentary of someone else's life, I guess." And the bitter chuckle that comes out of her sends chills up your spine. "You know, all these months I thought that my parents were the most they'd ever take from me—that they couldn't break me any more than that, that I had all the cards, just had to figure out what game we were playing_.  _Even when Isabel showed up," she mutters with a hard snort. "But it turns out that they messed with someone even more important than them way before_ any _of it. And… I can't even feel the way I'm supposed to about it—because it's just a movie, not what feels like my life or my… people close to me that I've barely even met for real. Isn't that fucked up?" She drags a hand through her hair, exposing dark circles under her eyes that you don't remember ever seeing before. "They'll never stop hurting the people around us, not as long as they think it'll get them what they want—and, Hunter, I just can't lose anyone else, okay? I can't give them that power."_

" _Okay.'" And after all you've been through, it's really as simple as that._

" _But I can't be alone any longer; I hate it. I miss… I miss everything. Even the things I missed out on. I miss being normal, and I miss having simple friends and going to the movies and putting together an engine just to see if I could," she says. "But we can't go back, and 'normal' doesn't exist for us anymore, and you and Jade are the only people in this place that I… trust. The only ones worth the risk."_

_It sounds like the end of her turn, with the way she bites her lip, and so you open your mouth to speak, without a clue of what to say—but then she adds, voice loaded as though this were the grand thesis statement instead of an afterthought, "And I'm tired of pretending that I waited three hours for you under that apple tree because of politeness or boredom."_

_She peeks up at you, gaze much less confident than you'd expected it to be—and that's when you finally dare to hope, just a little. "Why me?"_

" _Because you're Hunter," she says, as if that explained everything—and maybe it does, to her. "Because you're kind and you're funny, and heroic when you let yourself be. Because you're cute and you're normal, and way smarter than you give yourself credit for. Because you make me_ feel _when the whole world seems numb. Because you're… always there, and because I don't know how I'd cope with all this without the light that you give off_ — _and because some nights all I do is wish I had the strength to sneak next door and kiss you again," she admits. "How many reasons do you need, Hunter? 'Cause I could go on for a while."_

_As silence falls, your ears fill with white noise. You can only stare at her and listen, paralyzed._

" _I'm serious about this, you know," she adds when you don't say anything. "And not in a carpe diem way either. We didn't just meet last week or get horny because we think we're about to die. I want this; I want_ you _." Her voice cracks on the last word. "More than ever. Hunter, as long as no one can use it to hurt you, I'm yours completely."_

 _And something unwinds, unravels within you at the thought of her not wanting to lose you as something more than another faceless casualty that proves the evil of this place—of her trying to protect_ you _, of considering you something to lose for_ herself _._

" _So, are you in or out?" she asks.)_

* * *

 

 

 

"Casey, seriously, I need to  _go_."

Your earlobe remains firmly grasped between her lips. You think you hear a lazy smile in her voice when she whispers, breath ghosting over your skin, "Shh. Just two more minutes; your studying can wait that long."

Her nails drag lightly over your bare chest, down your side, on your hip, to the very edge of your slacks. You still can't get used to the feeling they leave behind; it's not a tickle, not fire, not even slight pain—more like heightened awareness, a draw of your consciousness towards the contact, as though your body finally becomes truly real, fully materialized in the physical plane, in those few moments before that glow fades.

"Gah, you're  _horrible_ ," you whine, but lift your head and sloppily press your mouth against where her loose dress has slipped off her shoulder anyway. A baffling, miraculous, nearly straight row of freckles marks the path from her neck to her arm; it carries the faintest scent of lilac and becomes so, so warm under your light touch. Her bra strap is tight and unbending between your teeth; she lets out the smallest of moans when you let it snap back to her skin. "You're supposed to be the  _strong_  one here."

With a graceful press against your cheek, she turns your head, and her lips find yours once more, soft and slow—and, as always, you forget how to speak, or how to dream, or how to think, all the way until she pulls away again and lays a finger gently on your tongue. Your hand brushes back her mass of golden curls; you're pretty sure you're looking up at her like a dazed idiot, but you stopped being embarrassed by that about two weeks after beginning to keep breath mints on your person at all times.

" _Guys_ ," she mutters fondly. "Always deflecting responsibility."

"Not guys," you say, grinning, and leave a trail of kisses from her cheek to the corner of her mouth, lingering there. Her tongue darts out, as if trying to reel you in. "Just me."

And, because the two of you never learn and always end up here—in a spiral that begins with a stolen smile from across the room, leads to clothes starting to pile up on the floor (one more article with each time it happens), and ends only when someone else snaps you out of that bubble—you lay a palm to her back and another on her thigh and guide her down next to you on the heap of abandoned beanbags you've been using to make out in the basement for the last week.

Your spine curves as she pulls you to her, burrowing into the smushy material with her back instead of her side. Her midnight eyes twinkle up at you between kisses. "You should really learn some self-control, Hunter," she chastises—but one of her legs lifts demonstratively and traps your knees under it. (You can't help but run your fingers along the smooth, bare flesh between where her high sock ends and her dress begins—or swallowing the soft sigh that escapes her as her eyes flutter shut.)

"At this point, we should probably just come to terms with that never happening," you argue sloppily, lips against hers. "'Cause I gotta be honest: I don't know how I could ever be with you and want to—much less be  _able_  to—leave. That's just not in the cards, sorry."

She pulls back to smirk at you in that way she does, like you're being ridiculous and she likes you all the more for it. "And what the fuck makes you think  _I_  could?" she asks through a smile, playing with your overgrown hair. Your heart blossoms with a hard beat—as it's prone to do now, when every day you become just a little more in love with Casey and just a little less convinced that you're the only one.

Still, you shrug. "I dunno, the same ironclad resolve that let you avoid even  _looking_  at a potential love interest when you came here?" you suggest, fingertips trailing down her neck to the hollow between her collarbones. Her pulse leaps to meet your touch.

"Oh my  _god_ , you are not allowed to make fun of me for that." She flicks you gently on the nose. "You weren't even  _there_."

And maybe it's because you're too lost in the way her hair smells, maybe because you've been kissing her so much lately that your mouth's forgotten how to talk right—or maybe because you've slowly learned how to tell her things and believe that she wants to hear them, wants to hear  _you_ —but the teasing fades as you brush a lock of hair from her eye with a thumb and, heart pounding, breathe, "Actually… I kinda was."

Her brow has the  _cutest_  way of twitching when she's confused. "Huh?" You bite back the urge to smooth it out with your lips; it may not be the time for that.

"The, uh… You know, the Papers Guy," you say, and immediately once the words are out, heat suddenly seeps out of you and leaves your insides cold, as though it had been waiting for just such an irreversible catalyst.  _Maybe this wasn't a good idea,_  flickers in the back of your mind. "That was… me. 'Now walk away forever,' and all that," you add, in case she thinks you're lying to get boyfriend points or something—though how this would earn you any, you have no clue.

Casey stares up at you, mouth flopping wordlessly, until she brushes her hair back with a shake of her head and props herself upright on her elbows. Her dress bunches up above her chest. "Wh— Wait,  _what_?"

"I was the one who bumped into you on that first day." You draw back on your knees, hand stuck to your neck and starting to clam up. _Definitely_ a bad idea. "I… didn't know you didn't know it was me until you told me the story that night on the roof, and by then things were already so weird with us—I didn't wanna make them even more awkward," you confess, heart racing now for all the wrong reasons.

"Wh— Hunter, that night was like  _five months ago_ ," she reminds slowly, and then, with an exasperated gesture: " _Two_  of which we've been  _dating_ , by the way!"

"I know! I know," you say, shuffling in place. "It's just— I mean, how do you bring something like that up, you know? Like, 'Yeah, that  _sure_  is a gruesome corpse we've stumbled upon here—oh, hey, did you know we're trapped in a romcom together?'" Your palms slap helplessly against your strained thighs. "Like, yes,  _fine_ , maybe I wasn't searching night and day for a way to tell you," you add before  _she_  can. "But… that's only because I really like what we have right now, and I didn't wanna risk messing that up over a stupid misunderstanding."

She mouths the word "messing" to herself slowly—then it clicks and she straightens, sitting up on your right, opposite you. "What, you mean like break  _up_?"

There's an edge of incredulity in her voice. You shrug, suddenly embarrassed about it. "Or other unpleasant things."

"Hunter, that's—"

"I know it's dumb," you say quickly. "Or, at least, I  _hope_  it is—objectively speaking." You link your hands in your lap, then look her in the eye. "But from where  _I'm_  standing, every time something changes in my life, it's for the worse. I'm  _serious_ ," you add when her look softens to one of affectionate condescension, like that of a parent who can see beyond their child's immediate, world-threatening concerns. "Every time something big happens, it's either bad or  _leads_  to bad stuff—my parents divorcing; my dad getting married; my mom winning that trip where she got an infection that made it harder to fight the cancer later on; the A minus I got in gym one time, which made Oliver Markovich suddenly think I could capably run  _away_  from him; that stranger who gave me a watch with weird carvings that I  _still_  maintain made time all wonky for me; the  _Star Wars_  prequels… Fucking coming to  _this_  place—I mean, I could go  _on_ ," you say.

Her teeth sink into her lip. "You  _could_ , huh?"

"Casey, I know I try to be hopeful and optimistic, and a lot of the time I  _do_  believe it—maybe because there's no other way, who knows—but, statistically speaking…" You shake your head with a shrug and a defeated sigh. "I just wanted to postpone  _us_  leading to bad things for as long as possible."

She reaches out to stroke your arm slowly. "And, what, you don't want to postpone it any longer?" she asks, half a smirk playing on her mouth.

You lay your palm on top of hers. "No, I just… kind of started thinking that maybe the eventual bad thing might not be this," you say, wondering whether she recognizes that for the immense display of trust and bravery it is. And you hope with all your might that you were right as you add what you've wanted to all along: "I'm sorry, Casey; please don't be mad."

She glances at you, then to her boots, lip bitten in thought. "I'm not mad," she replies, bending her knees to rest her chin on. "I'm just… processing."

You nod, a familiar awkwardness spreading through you that you had, peculiarly, almost begun to forget the feeling of lately. "Can I help with that?"

"Yes." She raises a decisive finger. " _Probably_. No? I don't know," she says, her other hand still rubbing absentminded circles on your arm. "I guess I was just really sure I'd never find out, regardless of who it actually was. Which was mostly okay," she adds with an easy grimace, "'cause that's what I wanted in the first place and it's not that big of a deal anyway, but… Sometimes there was this nagging feeling—like I  _owed_  it to myself to find out. So it's weird, like I simultaneously got what I wanted and _didn't_ want." Her face scrunches up to a twisted frown by the end.

"Do you… wish it'd been someone else?" you ask, heart rumbling like an almost active volcano.

Her lips twitch just before she says, "No." It comes out in the softest of breaths, and yet it somehow blows a substantial weight off your chest. "No, Hunter, I like it; it's a nice circle of sorts. I haven't really been thinking about it much lately—'cause I was too busy thinking about  _you,_  dumb-dumb," she adds with a grin and a pointed jab of her elbow into your stomach, "but if I  _had_ , I'd probably have had a  _You've Got Mail_ , 'I wanted it to be  _you_ ,' moment." She chuckles to herself. "It's actually kind of fitting—I mean, here we are, sneaking around like a couple of romcom characters anyway, right? Trope fulfilled." She motions ticking off a bullet point in the air with a click of her tongue. "Kinda like Monica and Chandler."

"Or Jeff and Britta," you supply, getting suddenly lost in the idea of a school-wide paintball war—that you would, naturally, lose within the first ten minutes. (But you'd make a decent supply boy.)

"Ben and Leslie." Casey links your palms together on her thigh with the utmost concentration. Her fingers fit perfectly in the spaces between yours—as they always have and always will, regardless of where life ends up taking both of you. Her voice comes out in a whisper. "Those are all sitcoms, Hunter. Are we in a  _sitcom_?" she wonders idly.

"We are most  _definitely_  not in a sitcom," you say with a shudder. Just last week you'd found out that the skeleton model in the Biology classroom had once been a student here. "So for believability's sake, let's just, uh…  _Oh_ , I can add Hodgins and Angela in there, too; they've  _probably_  had a sufficient amount of near-death experiences to go along with the sneaking around." After she gives you a bemused look, you defend, "Well, I mean,  _kinda_. They got married in secret when no one knew they were even back together, so… Shut up, it counts."

"Ah.  _Right._  I haven't seen that show beyond season two," she says, lips pursed. "Thanks for spoiling it."

And a part of you wants to ask why it matters, when she'll never get the chance to finish it—when she'll never get out of here, when you'll both die before even really  _trying_  to—but she has promised you, time and time again, a better future than that, and you've started stomping out the fear and doubt from your thoughts every time they creep up, and so instead you duck your head and bashfully say, "Sorry, I didn't know. I can make it up to you, though."

"Really? And how are you gonna do  _that?_ " she asks, shifting closer with a curious glint in her eye that makes you suspect she doesn't give a  _flying fuck_  about the spoilers.

You shuffle closer, too, insides warm again in the pleasant variety. " _Well_ , I could get a bunch of  _Snickers_  bars from the vending machines and cut them up into what might, upon  _very_  loose inspection, pass for an exclusive, one-of-a-kind box of chocolates," you say.

"Oooh, tell me more." Her hand slinks up your thigh, sending waves of tingles rushing every which way.

"Or I could… Trek down to the greenhouses and risk my life to pick you a bouquet of morning glories," you say, brushing strands of sunny hair away from her bare shoulder. "I saw them growing there once. That's romantic, right?" you check. "A display of reckless bravado for an ultimately futile gesture of affection."

Her lips quirk into a slow smile. "I'm swooning already."

"Good.  _Or_ …" You lean even closer, stopping only two inches away—but wait for her to close the distance, as a sign of forgiveness.

"Or…?" she whispers against your lips. You lift a finger between your faces and curve it towards yourself. Slowly.

And with a sudden grin, she winds her arms around your neck and crawls into your lap, knees digging into this makeshift mattress on either side of you—and then kisses you, deep and hard, until you're both breathless and aching with want. It's not lazy or playful this time; she clutches you closer than human anatomy should allow and moves against you with her entire body at each tug and pull of your lips—and, when she's run out of places to roam her hands over, Casey flexes her fingers, digs her nails into your back, and drags them roughly across it.

The growling sound that comes out of you doesn't even seem  _human_  as your spine arches to match her painfully slow path. You've never felt anything like the blood-boiling hunger that sears your vision and clots your throat now; you feel wild and helpless, like you are and will forever be at her mercy.

You hastily lay your lips on every part of her they can reach—on her cheek, her neck, her collarbone—inhaling, savoring,  _memorizing_  how rapidly her body expands and contracts with each breath, how the dim light flirts with her glistening skin. You bite softly down in the space where her shoulder rises into muscle, again and again as she turns away and bares it for you with a slight moan. And when she hastily tugs down the loose, striped cotton of her dress to expose the top of a black bra, you kiss there, too.

You're lost in the taste of her—absolutely  _drowning_  in the feel of her skin against yours, in how her fingers wind through your hair. She is everywhere, she is the entire universe to you right at this very moment, as she sinks back to the bean bags and takes you down with her. You don't know what's happening, not really, and you have no clue what the next second will bring or where it will all lead, but she is  _everything_  to you, and she curves against you like a snake, mouth hot and desperate upon yours, hands igniting your sides, legs ensnaring your hips in a tight grip; and now she's taking off her dress—

And that's probably why neither of you hear the approaching footsteps until the handle turns; that's probably why you can't even stop panting long enough to become quiet before the door a yard away from your feet swings open; that's why, when Ike waltzes in and starts looking through the shelves on the opposite side of it, you're on all fours with a half-undone belt over a Casey clad in only her underwear and fancy suede boots, and all you could think of to say, if he were to turn around and see the two of you, would be, "The nerve— The  _audacity!_  Casey is our  _leader_ , technically, and she is  _terrible_ , face-wise, and how… How… do I know, frankly, that  _you're_  not making out with her right now?"

He whistles something vaguely familiar under his breath as the two of you hold perfectly frozen, unwilling to let even the slightest of plastic pellet landslides happen underneath you, lest he  _hear_.

Her hand clamps immediately over your mouth and yours over hers; you both stare wide-eyed as Ike starts slightly moving and then outright  _wiggling_  his butt to the tune of what you suddenly realize is Taylor Swift, circa 2008. An iPod lies strapped to his waist, headphones in his ears, and you'd  _think_  that that would ease this gripping need to turn into stone as much as humans are able to, but even so—breathing is  _out_  of the question.

Then he picks out the blue glass bottle he wants and mutters a quiet noise of approval—and, after a quick flip toss, spins around on his heel, loudly singing, " _Whoooooooooaaaaa_."

Your heart stops.

Casey lets a small, high shriek slip out through her nose as Ike halts mid-whirl, arms outstretched as if posing, turned exactly enough to take in your sight in its full glory and make fun of it before telling the whole school and the faculty, too—but his eyes are firmly shut.

He lets out another long—and embarrassingly off-key, but that's not important—note before turning back to the shelf and letting some of your blood start circulating again. Thing is, he keeps picking out bags of chips and packets of utensils with that same cheerful hum; each time, he spins around and ends up facing you, and, each time, your heart shoots forward with enough force to break a castle—so it's a miracle that, when, with a final snap of his fingers, he moonwalks back into the rec room and closes the door behind him, your ribs still feel perfectly intact.

Neither of you move for seconds upon seconds, eyes flickering between the handle and the shadows moving in the light from under the door.

Your shaking palm sticks to her lips as you slowly dare to take it back, still heaving but no longer from being with her. She unwraps her legs from you and sits up; your knees wobble as you sit back on them. You're still so very heated and acutely alert to her presence inches away, but there's cold sweat and alarm now too, and your body doesn't know how to react.  _You_  don't know how to react.

Finally, you settle on muttering, "Holy shit."

And then burst out laughing.

She stares frozen at you for only one long beat before joining in. Her snorts are powerful but melodic, and the two of you bury your heads in your hands between staring at each other with incredulity—because this is  _real_ , this is  _actually happening_ ,  _these are your lives_. She's still almost naked, and you're kind of tripping over your half-undone pants, and the two of you can't shut up with your horny hysterics—except you don't think either of you are even really  _trying_  to, even though you can hear Ike in the next room and he could come back at any moment and it would really bode well to be quiet right now.

Just when you think you've got it out of your system, you glance at her again, with her dimples and her helplessly kinked eyebrows, and it starts all over again, and you have no idea  _why_. She laughs and laughs, and you adore the sound even as you can't stay quiet for more than a second yourself, and eventually she doubles over and sags against your shoulder, rocking your whole body soundlessly as you try to hold her together.

Then, finally, she throws her head back and rubs her face with a sigh of exertion, and asks, "Pass me my jacket?"

The two of you are sitting on some of your clothes, and there's more on the floor, half hidden under the mess of your open backpack's spilled contents, but somehow you manage to spot the black leather and dig it out from under the debri of chewed pencils and crumpled doodle confetti. She snatches it out of your hands and pulls out her phone, working with quick, agile fingers to type something through the last of her giggles as you try to clean up some of the mess, stretching down with one arm.

You like her hands—the science symbols she draws on her pastel-painted nails during class with a gel pen; all the tiny scars left from her various projects and the habit of picking at her cuticles; the softness of her skin despite them. She had told you once that she'd been playing the piano until shortly after getting her acceptance letter; she'd said that her fingers have become abnormally long because of the stretching it had required, that she wished they could go back to being "normal people fingers"—but you look at them in motion now, and you only see the grace of a dancer, only perfect control and fluidity and  _beauty_.

You could stare at them forever, and almost intend to, but your curiosity gets the best of you and so you peek down at the actual words:

_r u w/ ike?_

_dont let him in the supply room. thx_

"Jade?" you guess.

"Who else," Casey mutters, because no one else in the entire world knows about you two— _hopefully_ —and then she carefully puts the phone back into her pocket and zips it, letting out a long and heavy sigh now that both the heat and the frenzy have simmered down some. "Hunter, what are we  _doing_?"

( _Each other_ , apparently.) You stretch your legs out from under you because they're beginning to fall asleep, and you shift now instead to sit cross-legged, head falling onto your elbow. You stare up at her for a long moment, and then glance around the dark room and your own bare abdomen. "I don't know," you finally admit in a half-slur, mouth pressed against your hand. It's not a lie.

"Why does this— I mean, how do we always end up here?" she asks with a small, nervous chuckle, and then draws in on herself as if only now remembering that she's mostly naked.

"Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say ' _here_ ,' necessarily," you argue, gesturing to pile of clothes around you—which  _is_  new territory, despite how many times it's already almost come to that. "But, yeah, we could probably do with a little more talking about these things."

"Probably," she agrees—and then both of you stare at your hands, lips tight and all mood gone. Distant sounds of music float in through the closed doorway, mingling with muffled laughs and colorful lights. It sounds like an actual party out there, if the sudden chorus of excitement is anything to go by; you'll be forever baffled by Ike's ability to create a good time out of anything, anywhere, even a fucking lunch period in a horror story.

A few times you think you see her glance up out of the corner of your eye, and you briefly wonder whether she's waiting for you to say something. It'd be a doomed mission if so, as you're not just silent for the lack of things to say, though it probably seems as such. No, this time instead of filling up the awkwardness, your mind's actively cycling through your feelings and desires and goals in a valiant and groundbreaking effort to try to figure out what it actually is that you consciously  _want_  here.

You're not used to letting yourself want things. (Or making your own decisions, instead of accepting or rejecting someone else's initiative.)

And just when you think you might have an answer, or what could evolve into something  _resembling_  an answer given enough time to mull it over, she raises her head and quietly, carefully says, "Hunter, you knock my  _socks_  off."

You glance up, to her unreadable face—then to her feet, which are still sporting both her ankle boots and the high socks underneath. "What?"

She bursts out snickering. "Oh my  _god_ , you doof, I'm trying to say I really like you."

"Oh." You smile despite yourself. "Oh, well, same."

"No, I mean  _really_ ," she emphasizes, playing with a lock of her hair to avoid your gaze. "To the point where it's actually becoming a problem."

You blink. "How so?"

She ducks her head below, but you see a smile blossom on it. "Because I can't stop thinking about you," she says softly, and when you're about to protest the negative, she continues: "And that's  _bad_  because, while  _really_  nice, it kinda cuts into my 'thinking about other things' time."

"Ah," you drawl as the notion stops being ridiculous. "Yeah, I can see how that could be a problem. You have a lot of other things."

" _Yes_ , I do, and they're kind of slipping," she says, a weird undertone to her voice. After noticing your questioning gaze, she adds, "I don't think you need to be worried just yet, Hunter, I just— It's getting a little hard to manage." She tucks hair behind her ear and scratches her neck with a shrugging gesture. "Between homework, student council meetings, Mr. N, being Hodge's lapdog, trying to undo everything I do for her, making sure she doesn't  _find out_  I'm undoing those things," she adds wryly, "and then juggling you, Jade, and the rest of the student body—it's getting kind of hard to keep track of who I'm supposed to be for which person."

(You don't wonder whether she's anyone other than Casey with you. Not anymore—or maybe you never  _have_.)

"Wh— You don't think she  _suspects_  anything, do you?" you ask, laying a hand on her knee.

"No, I—" She exhales sharply. "I don't know," she admits. "I want to believe that if she did, I would be down in the dungeons right now, but who the fuck knows what's going on in her head half the time. Especially since what happened to Vanessa." Her distant gaze takes on the sheen of steel for a moment, a look you're very familiar with. "But even if she doesn't, I've ruined enough of our plans for her to be getting antsy soon—and I still haven't figured out how to deal with her once I get my parents back. She's  _gonna_  know that I know," Casey says, mouth set in lines of worry. "There's no way I'd know how to bring them back without her help if I didn't remember the few things Clarkson found out."

And because you spend so little of your already scarce time together talking about this, about the important things that she cannot bring up in group meetings where you pretend to be indifferent to each other anyway—and because most of what you know about her quest comes from Jade's secondhand recounts—you perk up. "Is it looking likely?"

She beams immediately, smiling at you with all the crooked incisors she usually makes such an effort in hiding. "Yeah," she says, voice thick. "Yeah, it is. It might…" She swallows, with some difficulty. "It might only be a couple weeks now."

"That's good," you say in relief, reaching out to stroke her arm. She lays her palm on top of yours, eyes glistening. "That's really good. You know I'm here for you, right? Whatever you need."

"I know," she assures, bringing your joined knuckles up to press her lips to them. "And that's what scares me. That's what I was trying to say before—I get so wrapped up in you, Hunter," she says, voice gentle and full of wonder somehow. "When I'm with you, everything else stops mattering, and when I'm not, I wish I were."

You nod along, partly to hide the utter happiness from showing. "So, basically, I'm a huge distraction," you conclude.

"In the  _best_  possible way," she emphasizes, half-smiling, "but yeah. And I feel like if you give me any more reasons to think about you—" her eyes dart down for a long beat, to the  _Kid Flash_  boxers peeking out of your fly "—that I'm never gonna  _stop_." She scoots over to your side and wraps her arms around your neck in a wide gesture that is as childlike as it is simple. Her ear rests on your shoulder as you raise your hands to her bare back. "I'm  _so close_ , Hunter," she whispers, more yearning in those few words than you may have felt in your entire life. "I need this to work; I feel like I'm gonna break if it doesn't." Her pulse rattles against your skin. "I can't afford to mess it up. They deserve  _better_."

You only squeeze her tighter and lay palm on her head, stroking her hair in slow half-moons. "I know," you breathe. "I know."

"I'm already in too deep with you, probably." She chuckles against your skin. It tickles. "I don't think we can reverse that—and I wouldn't want to anyway," she adds, pressing her lips slightly to the bony edge of your shoulder. "But I think that maybe I need to put the brakes on this, on us. Until this madness is all over, at least. Not like Ross and Rachel," she adds immediately, drawing back to look you in the eye. "And not the 'leading to bad things' stuff either, before you get any ideas."

Not too long ago you would've panicked at the words, would've applied mountains of subtext of your own invention to them. Now, you flash a quick smile and say, "Don't worry, I get it. No going in deeper, but no heading for shore either. We stay where we are."

"That's right," she says and kisses you softly, arms still embracing you. It perplexes you even after all this time, how easy holding her can be—how all your insecurities fall away in moments like these, to return only when the two of you are far, far apart. (Or sometimes never at all.) Minutes pass, and goosebumps start to rise on your arm, and just when your breaths start quickening again, blood racing, she pulls away with a small noise. "Fffnnng, this is gonna be  _exactly_  as hard as I thought."

You gaze at her, dazed. "What is?"

Her eyes trail intently, unhurriedly down your entire body, then back up, leaving tingles behind from their immaterial weight. With a pouty grimace, she lets out another low, drawn-out growl that eventually morphs into, "Not taking your pants off, which is all I want to do right now."

"Yeah?" You beam.

"Yeah," she confesses, staring into what feels like your very soul as the corners of her mouth turn up. Then she blinks with a quick shake of her head. "No! No. You're supposed to say, 'Casey, that's gross and I'm not ready, and you're  _disgusting_.'"

You shrug in one long motion, a shameless grin plastered to your face. "Can't. Mom raised me not to lie," you say. And then, just in case there's any doubt, you add, " _None_  of that is true."

She bites her lip, eyes glued to you. "None?" There's something in her voice you have no word for. (Hope, or maybe doubt, or anxiety, perhaps.)

"None," you breathe and gently press your mouth to hers, once; your heart melts into a puddle at the way she leans into the kiss. And you don't pull back upon breaking it, only shift the angle of your face so that what's touching is your foreheads instead of lips. "Now that that's cleared up, though… I suppose I  _could_  try to learn some of that self-control you were talking about earlier. For your sake," you clarify.

"Wow," she mutters, breath tingling your skin. "My hero."

"Starting with suggesting that we put some clothes on," you continue, patting her butt as firmly as you dare. "To avoid temptation and such."

She nods slowly against your face. "That sounds reasonable." But neither of you move.

Her heartbeat thuds against your ribs, a steady metronome you feel yourself matching as the seconds and minutes tick away. Her arms tighten around you, clutching you uncomfortably close for a few of them, as though she wanted to mold your flesh together so that your every crevice would match her every ridge to perfection—then she releases you and kisses the tip of your nose, never once removing her forehead from yours. "I wonder how much studying's involved in learning this fabled self-control," you muse, caressing her back and wishing you could do it forever.

"Wouldn't know," she teases, one finger lazily ghosting down your chest and leaving fire behind. "Never  _was_  any good at it."

You tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. "I hope there's no test."

At that, she blinks and finally pulls back, half-untangling from you. "Didn't you have an  _actual_  test today?"

It takes a beat for you to remember that the world doesn't exist solely of you and her and this room. It's a jarring experience, when you'd been so  _certain_  of it a moment ago, but you're human and you have needs like eating and sleeping, as well as responsibilities, like going to school—even if it  _is_  a horror house. Bit by bit, the to-do list you'd compiled this very morning trickles back to you, and then— " _Shit!_ "

You jump off the bean bags in search of a shirt—so fast that you trip over your own feet and fall flat to the floor.

"Whoa, whoa! Easy," she says, hurrying to help you up, all lean limbs and strong arms. "It's gonna be fine, Hunter. Deep breaths."

You glance to the door, intensely hoping that Ike—or anyone else, really—hadn't heard the crash. "How long have we been here? What time is it?" Your left arm rises out of habit, even though the watch on it hasn't been useful for a long time. Pulse thuds in your ears.

She dashes to the seats still warm from your bodies and digs her phone out once more. "Don't worry, we've still got fifteen minutes before the next period starts," she says, holding it out at you for good measure. "You won't get much studying in before, though, I'm afraid. Sorry about that."

You snap your eyes shut and concentrate on inhaling and exhaling. Tardiness is unforgivable at Morning Glory Academy—but you're not late  _yet_. "Thanks. And it's okay; it was worth it," you add with a smile, though your heart's still beating thunderously.

"You have time," she repeats reassuringly, "so please don't break your neck, Hunter; I'm pretty fond of it." You think you hear half a laugh from her approximate direction. "It's a good call, though—we should probably go."

"Probably," you agree and turn back to her, and she looks at you—and her cheeks are still pink and her hair still messy, and your slacks still a little too tight in the crotch.

And then the two of you are standing half-naked in a pile of your own mess, unable to keep your eyes from straying all over each other as that dangerous, all-consuming hunger invades the space between your head and your heart again. Her underwear is a matching set; good parts of both consist of some translucent fabric that makes your fingers ache with need. Her eyes become fixed upon your abdomen—and when you realize that, the air turns dry and tight again, as if someone had flipped a switch.

And just like that, you feel the spiral beginning once more.

The last of your growth spurts still hasn't ended; you're a little taller than her now, which somehow makes you feel even more uncovered and vulnerable in front of her—as though you're letting her see parts of you unseen and unexplored by you yourself. She has an almost perfect rhombus of freckles around her navel; you're just noticing that now, and suddenly you're mystified about where your attention's been wandering the previous sixteen and a half years of your life, about what could  _possibly_  have been more important than this.

(How much more is there to be noticed, you wonder.)

And because you're seconds away from kneeling at her feet and kissing each of them a hundred times, and then the rest of her, too, you blindly swipe her dress from behind you where she'd thrown it earlier—and fling it right at her. (It's a miracle Ike hadn't seen the material; it'd been right there, on the shelf below the bottles.)

She stares at the stripes in her hands for a second too long, chest heaving and eyes darting up at you once, so quickly that you might have imagined it; for a moment you feel as if she's about to toss it away again and jump you right then and there, caution be damned—but then, thankfully,  _regrettably_ , she sticks her hands through and swiftly pulls the garment on.

(Her hands tremble only a little when she lifts her golden hair out of it.)

You follow suit, head a little less clouded now that you can no longer see the lace of her bra, and, one by one, your shoes, shirt, and cardigan all find their rightful places on your body. You clumsily shovel all the crap that spilled out of it back into your backpack as she lifts her hair into the messy ponytail she'd come in here with, clip held between her teeth.

"Oh, mm, Hunter, wait—" she says as you peek through the keyhole to see whether the coast is clear. The party seems to have ended. "Your tie is crooked."

And she pulls you back up and fiddles with the knot, brow furrowed in concentration. There's little else to do but stare at her fussing, and you feel yourself gaze in awe, as is still so commonplace, when she fixes your collar, smooths out the creases, and then your shaggy hair, too. "Well, aren't  _we_  a scene in any romcom ever," you can't help but add when her palms rest on your chest with a shaky exhale, time suddenly slowing as she gets a  _look_  in her eye.

She straightens, lip bitten, and looks up at you—then to her hands. A snort bursts out. "True," she admits, grinning as she fastens one more button on your cardigan. "True." Then: "Are you free tomorrow?"

"I don't think so," you say, brushing back a stray lock of her curls. "Hannah's been making noises about this game of Monopoly for  _weeks_ ; I don't think I could get out of it even if I wanted to. Friday?" you offer.

"Hodge duty," she says with a sigh and steps away. "Not sure about the weekend either."

"Mrgh. One more for the road then," you say and pull her back by her wrist. She spins into your arms, hands landing on your shoulders, yours on her waist, and you don't even have to go kiss her—she does it first, lips pliable and smiling against yours for a full minute.

It's slow and comfortable and  _wonderful_  in only that way that it can be when you're savoring each moment, each breath without knowing when the chance will come again. "And all of a sudden, I don't want to leave again," she says upon pulling back.

"Well, you're  _welcome_  to stay," you declare and pick up your backpack, fully aware that she has another free period after this. " _I_ , however, have to go anyway, because if I don't, I'm probably gonna get decapitated—and then you'll be stuck making out with a corpse. That's not hot at all."

She shakes her head. "No, it's not. Fine,  _logic_  your way out of it," she says and swings her jacket over her arm with a pout. "I'm gonna miss you, you know."

You grin. "Ditto." And because you feel happy in this moment, because she looks like a goddess despite her slightly smeared eyeliner and jagged nails, because you'd never really felt physically desirable until you'd seen her eyes raking over every inch of you like she wanted to eat you alive and now you doubt you'll ever question it again, you almost tell her the truth—that you love her.

It's not fear that stops you this time. It's not a crippling conviction that you are not worthy enough to possess love for her, not a belief that the words don't matter enough to say aloud, not an anxiety over her reaction, which could range from outraged shock to what you've only recently begun considering  _could_  be different—that she does not feel the same.

It's not even the idea that you need to keep it to yourself, like every other thought and feeling and concern you've ever had, which have always led to trouble when voiced and, for you, to pain. No, you let that love flow through your every movement, every smile, every word now—and you don't bother worrying whether she can see it as plainly as you can and then agonizing about whether you want her to or not.

This time, you keep quiet not out of a sense of obligation or cowardice, but simply because of this unspoken promise to slow down, to stop changing things until you're both free to embrace them without reservation. You keep quiet because you've survived this long and you're getting pretty good at it, and she's always there to protect you, just as you're always ready to pick her up after she does.

You don't say it because you trust the both of you to keep going, trust that there'll be time later—and it can wait.

"Come on, let's go," you say with a nod and lead her by the hand into the great big world outside this bubble. It's a place full of pain and vultures circling dark clouds; your fingers disentangle as soon as another person comes around the corner, just as your features morph into annoyance and indifference, just as the words that come out of your mouths grow progressively snappier and rude, if they appear at all.

You storm away from her with an eyeroll in front of a well-placed camera, and she shouts something irritated after you just loud enough for several peers to hear, and, still concerned about the time, you dash to the Physics classroom fast enough to irritate the asthma that you don't have, where you plop down next to Jade and make sure to loudly but not  _too_  obviously complain about Casey—and listen as she complains right back—before trying to cram some formulas in the few minutes that are left.

And from between the pages of your textbook, a neatly folded note falls into your lap.

_Good luck!_

_Two atoms walk down the street. One of them says, "Hold on! I think I just lost an electron." "You sure?" the other one asks. "Yeah, I'm positive!"_

_You'll do great._ — _C_

You chuckle quietly as your fingers tear the paper to shreds, and then spend most of the next hour—and the next day, and the next week, and the next month—thinking about her with a stupid grin on your face that you attribute to the DVD collection Esi's been smuggling in when anyone asks.

* * *

 

 

 

(Weeks later, you burst through the doors of Hodge's office, out of breath and slightly out of mind. "Casey, what is it?" you demand of her kneeling form on the floor. "What's wrong?" Her text had said to come quick and little else.

She's texted you twice in the entire time you've been together. (Too dangerous.)

"Tell me something only you know," she commands, back turned—and it takes you several seconds of bafflement to realize she isn't talking to you but into the giant phone device Hodge had confiscated from Vanessa months ago, before the girl had disappeared. "No," she says, voice trembling. "Something  _else_."

"Casey?" you try again, and this time she hears.

Her head whips around in alarm, face pale and lips dry; she softens and waves you over with hasty, weak movements when recognition dawns. You hurry over to her side, and though she doesn't seem physically injured—not that you're the best judge of that—the blood dripping from her nose and the hair stuck to her forehead with sweat don't do much to alleviate your worry.

There's moisture in her eyes as she listens to whoever's on the other end but also a smile on her face. You search through everything you know about her for several seconds as her mouth grows tighter along with her forehead, but it's only when she grabs your hand in hers so hard you think it might break that you finally realize what's happening—just in time for a shaky sob to escape her and the first tear to spill over, and for her to croak out, hand clutched to her own mouth, " _Hi,_  Daddy."

You break out in a teary laugh, too, as the deep voice on the other end reaches you; and she falls onto your shoulder, limp as jelly, when he puts his wife on the phone and then within seconds all of them are laughing; and you press your lips to the side of her head, again and again and again, as your hands rub her upper arms in as much encouragement as an attempt to get some heat back into her. And you never,  _ever_  let go.

Water falls to her knees in almost a steady stream now, and her breath comes out broken as she talks to her parents, and she doesn't seem to be able to stand—whether from supernatural exhaustion or emotional toll, you don't know—but it's the  _best_  you've ever seen her be, and you can't believe this is actually happening and not just a wishful dream, and your heart seems to swell to three times its size as the seconds turn to minutes, and the minutes into an hour.

You wrap your other arm around her shoulders and explain it to Jade when she, too, tumbles through the door nearly frenzied, and the jealousy over Casey getting to cheat death while you cannot do the same doesn't creep up on you until much, much later—and  _nothing_  could take away from the perfection of this moment right now.

Nothing.)

 

 

((A note sits on Hodge's desk next to where the phone had been, unnoticed by any of you.))

 

 

(((Later, when the immediate glow of joy and relief has passed and Casey stares out the window, motionless and pale, with a hand over her heart and a heaviness in her eyes—well, you don't notice that either.)))

 

 

_say you mean it, seal it up, say you wanna try / and every day is like a battle, but every night with us is like a dream / you know i can't be found with you; we get back to my house, your hands, my mouth, now i just stop myself around you_

* * *

 

 

 

**(vi.)**

_(In another time, a gust of raven hair swishes through a door broken off its hinges. The usually prim woman's clothes are frenzied, her breath airless. "Doctor Ellsworth," she gasps out, knuckles pale against the mahogany desk. "Something's wrong."_

_Regret flickers across a freckled face, briefly tinged with affection. "I see."_

" _Julie, she— She's—" The woman forces herself to exhale deeply, clutches nonexistent files to her chest. "We have to do something, call someone! Everything we've done, everything we've worked for—"_

" _That won't be necessary, Alicia," Jade says calmly and shuffles her papers into order with one leg crossed. "We always knew meddling with reality like this was a longshot. Borrowed time, if you will," she adds with a hint of a rueful smile. "There's two things you can unfailingly count on Hunter to be—brave and very, very stupid. It's an axiom anyone would be fool to try altering.")_

* * *

 

A sense of deja vu comes creeping in as you trip your way down a set of unforgivingly hard stairs of stone into a part of the basement eery in its tidiness—not a speck of dust, not a mound of dirt out of place, and even the brick tiles on walls align perfectly with one another. You can't say the other branches of the basement which look as ancient and worn as they actually  _are_  creep you out any less, but it still sort of feels like this methodical cleanliness (which you're not sure any one person is actually responsible for, that it might just stay that way on its own eternally) is a very  _specific_  brand of creepy.

You wander through the dark hallway without certainty over whether you want to get to the end of it and then, palms sweating, you swallow your dread and push the thick wooden door once opened by someone you're no longer quite sure was real. (And yet, if you ever saw her long, fiery hair again, you'd immediately rank her among your already sparse and still quickly dwindling allies.) You have to admit you never got around to looking up the actual definition of deja vu, to exploring the deepest nooks and crannies of the concept, but somehow you're convinced that it doesn't count when the same exact thing actually  _happens_  twice.

It may be a circle or a parallel—or an ending—but the heavy contraption feels just as dense under your fingers as it had all those months ago, and the sudden flash of pure white light blinds you just as it had before, and the gust of wind nearly knocks you off your feet in what is decidedly an echo of a  _real_  memory, not a half-remembered dream. And when your eyes adjust, they land on a girl with golden hair who stands with her back to you a foot away from a spinning cylinder that swallows her silhouette up with its enormity. Just like before.

You know the instant you see her that things will turn out differently this time.  _Worse._

Because she's hugging herself like you've only seen her do once before; because she's wearing her favorite indigo cocktail dress, which she  _never_  does out of fear for damaging what used to belong to her mother; because a crumpled paper that you recognize as Daramount's ultimatum peeks out of the backpack at her feet—because of all of these things, your heart falls into your stomach and tries to make a smoothie out of its contents while the rest of you clenches down in denial.

This could be something else. This could be one of those secret genius plans that Casey has, because she's Casey, and she's a genius, and some of her plans hinge on being secret to everyone but her. She could be out for a midnight stroll because nightmares kept her awake—that  _has_  happened before. Many times.

For god's sake, she could be  _sleepwalking_.

Just because Hodge woke you up fifteen minutes ago to warn you of what she would be doing, doesn't mean that it's real, that that's what's actually  _happening_. Just because you got out of bed because some part of you may or may not think Casey capable of it, doesn't mean it's not just paranoia. Just because you ended up down here, in this basement, doesn't mean you weren't simply curious about where her directions would lead, because you've been in this place for over seven months and still get lost anywhere outside the three ground floors of the main building.

That's what this is. Hodge being a scheming liar and you buying into it. You'll take Casey by the hand and get out of here in a moment, and then laugh about this in the morning.

That's it. Nothing else.

Nothing.  _Nothing_. Noth—

...God, you weren't supposed to  _find_  her here.

(This room was supposed to be empty, and you were supposed to muddle your way back to your room, half-asleep and feeling like an idiot for  _actually going down there_ , and when you told Casey about it the next day, she was supposed to make a face and lightly swat you on the shoulder, and maybe get legitimately  _mad_  a little that you would believe Hodge over something like this. That's a  _lot_  of failed 'supposed to's—so how, exactly, are you  _supposed_  to react to  _this_?)

Ice trickles through your veins instead of blood now. Your breath comes out as if it couldn't wait to leave, though it may never have really arrived in the first place. Your nails dig into the soft flesh of your palm past the point of pain, until metal-tinged warmth starts dripping down your finger.

You  _have_  to be dreaming. This  _has_  to be your irrational fear of losing Casey, manifesting itself into the temporary reality of your subconscious. You have to be dreaming. She can't actually be about to  _sacrifice herself_.

 _Wake up_ , Hunter. Wake up. Wake up.

 _Please_.

You chant these words to yourself as the minutes pass and the only thing that moves in this standstill picture is hair curving around Casey's head in the wind. (She's so still, so quiet. You'd mistake her for a statue, or for someone else entirely, if she weren't so unmistakably, unrelentingly  _her_.) You chant them to keep something from climbing up your throat—tears or vomit or blood, you're not sure—chant to ignore the creeping terror turning into hard, unbendable wires in your veins that leave you paralyzed, chant  _even_  as the air turns to dust in your lungs.

Then her hand rises, up, up, toward the shiny metal you only know as a source of pain, and your entire being tenses with immediate alarm, and instinctively, before it's too late, without any attempt to conceal the hurt twitching through your nerves, it escapes you—a weak, "You weren't even gonna say goodbye?"

Casey whips around, arms flying to a combat position—then jerkily hidden behind her back, like that of a mischievous child caught in the act. There's surprise in her gaze, and then regret, and shame, and pain. You don't know which to be offended at more—but then, it's not like the only thing you really notice isn't how she doesn't wave you over good-naturedly or demand what the fuck you're doing following her, or smile in that way she does so that the tiniest of dimples hollow her cheeks.

She doesn't say or do  _anything_ —and that's how your heart breaks, once and for all.

You'd thought you were familiar with the origin sensation of the phrase. You'd felt the ache, the unbearable spasming deep within your chest and down your arms—the stream of tears that never dried out, not after hours and hours hours, and left you swollen and numb. You had known what it was.

Now it feels as though your heart itself has snapped in two before freezing over and getting smashed and shattered by the rib cage clenching impossibly inward. The shards dig into every vital organ you possess, and how long will it be before  _you_  die, too?

You stand in place, broken. "You weren't even gonna say  _goodbye_." Your voice cracks. Your vision blurs. It's an accusation now—perhaps the first you've ever made at her.

Her lips twitch for moments on end, cycling through a list of things to say. "I thought it'd be easier," she whispers at last, and it's not a denial, or an apology, or a misunderstanding. And the last shred of hope you had left falls, torn, away. It's real. This is  _real_.

So much washes over you, so much courses through you—so much threatens to undo you apart at the very atoms. The only recourse, the only  _escape_  is to clamp down and stop feeling anything, then spit it all back out at her—and so the snort you let escape sounds cruel even to you, but you make no attempt to temper it. "For me or for  _you_?"

She flinches at the hard edge of your voice. "You could've hated me for that," she says with conviction, raising her gaze to yours, but still her voice somehow falters. "You could've hated me for not saying goodbye, and forgotten to be mad at me for leaving at all."

"Right," you deadpan through teeth, tears crawling up your throat, "because  _that_  seems likely."

You'd known this would happen. You had fucking  _known_  that it would all end this way, with your very soul crushed against the pavement by a spinning wheel, and still you'd let yourself dare to hope that it wouldn't. In your trust, in your faith, in your  _love_ , you'd forgotten to deny yourself happiness when it came creeping in; you should've known  _better_. (Maybe, if you had, it could've lasted forever.)

"Hunter, I—"

"What the fuck are you  _doing_ , Casey?" you demand, face twisted as you approach her. "First Ian, then Jun—that thing's gonna  _kill_  you; you  _do_  realize that?"

For every step you take, she takes another, and you try not to let their backwards attribute cut you, but there is too much you're already busy not feeling—you have no room for burying this, too.

"It's a lot more complicated than that," she says, hugging her bare arms, still ten paces away.

You nod curtly, once. "Then  _please_  explain it to me," you force out through gritted teeth, nose flaring, eyes stinging, "because right now it looks a  _whole lot_  like you're about to commit suicide in a pointless attempt to worship whatever energy this thing runs on—which you fucking know has  _never_  worked and has only ever screwed things up  _worse_ , and then you won't even be here to  _fix_  them."

"It's not like that this time," she says, a pleading in her eyes. "You saw what happened last week! All of our messing with this thing, the endless back-and-forth—  _Someone_  has to set it right again; you know that as well as I do, Hunter."

" _No!_  First of all—no, I  _don't!_ " you yell in half a smile, arms flailing. "None of us know  _anything_ , remember? And every time one of us  _thinks_  they do, shit gets bad  _real_  fast. Or do I need to remind you about Irina?" Your lips tighten, eyes focused only on her. "Second, neither fucking do  _you!_  Casey, you've told me about a  _billion_  times that even with all that Clarkson knowledge, you  _still_  have no clue what the fuck is happening here," you say.

"That was then, but—"

"And  _third_  of all—" you hold up both palms "—even if we  _did_  somehow know beyond the shadow of a doubt that this needed to be done—nobody ever said it had to be  _you_. I could name roughly a  _hundred_  people at this school right off the bat whose deaths would be a  _lot_  more deserved and a  _lot_  less grieved," you spit out darkly. "We could go tie Ian Number Three up  _right now_ , if you want; I don't mind."

Her shoulders sag; her sigh could cut diamonds. "Hunter, will you just shut up and  _listen_  for a second—"

"No! I'm not  _done!_ " You march towards her, and she doesn't move back like she'd had before, and two yards from her calm, still figure you take a sharp turn to the left and start pacing in chaotic circles, because you'll explode if you don't, but you don't trust yourself to be that close to her. (You don't trust yourself not to break.) "If you want to pointlessly sacrifice yourself without even the  _decency_  to say goodbye, then  _fine_ , that's your prerogative—but you are  _damn well_  gonna listen to me yell at you about it!"

"I'm  _sorry_  about that," she insists, voice inexplicably tender.

Sincerity radiates off her in waves and reaches you in her gaze, but instead of softening and forgiving, as you always have and had thought you always would, you halt the pacing to glare at her and quietly say, "No. You don't get to do this, Casey. You don't get to say 'sorry' and think that that somehow  _fixes_  everything." Your head shakes infinitesimally as you speak, as her gaze lowers. Then: "God, I am so fucking  _angry_  at you right now!"

"Look, I—"

" _No_ ," you declare—maybe because half of you expects her to have a perfectly reasonable and logical explanation for this, as she always does, and then you won't be able to talk her out of it, and you're not ready to face that. You hold up a single finger. It shakes. "No.  _Fifth_  of all—"

"Fourth," she corrects, arms crossed, head turned away—the picture of resignation.

" _Whatever_." You rub your face, wipe the spit stuck to your hand on your colorful pajama bottoms. "Look, what I don't get is— Nobody ever said anyone had to die to  _begin_  with, okay? Like— Like, who says that this is the only way to achieve that thing that, may I remind you, we  _don't know needs to be achieved?_ " you demand. "I mean, who the fuck said that a bunch of us couldn't link hands and do this together and get a nosebleed each, huh?"

"The note was very  _specific_ —"

"And it was written by the people who killed your parents in the first place!" you announce with a disbelieving laugh. "Let's go ahead and  _believe_  them! It's not like  _they_  could have ulterior motives."

"Of  _course_  they have ulterior motives, Hunter; do you think I'm  _stupid?_ "

You gesticulate self-evidently, mouth tight. " _Yeah_. Yeah, that's pretty much what I'm getting right now," you say. "Casey, there could be a  _million_  ways around this, and you're not even  _looking_  for them! Like,  _god_ , what do you think Jade and I have been  _doing_  for the last three days?" you demand. "All because Daramount  _says_  she 'might' be able to track them down,  _someday?_  You took every precaution, every—"

"I'm not willing to risk it!" she shouts back, her stillness crumbling. She stumbles toward you. "After  _everything_  that I went through to bring them back, everything I did and gave up, do you  _really_  think I would stop at anything to keep them safe? Then  _you're_  the stupid one," she announces, tears forming in her eyes.

A hard-edged chuckle crawls out. " _Right_. Silly me for believing that the expense of your own life would be where you draw the line," you say, taking great care to enunciate each word. "Silly me for thinking that you might actually want to spend  _time_  with them before getting reincarnated to who knows where. Silly,  _silly_  me for suggesting that maybe,  _just_  maybe, the people who unconditionally love you most in the world might not actually  _want_  you to exchange your life for theirs."

And though you really,  _honestly_  don't mean to include yourself in that, you've watched a half dozen of your friends give up their lives for someone else's over the last few months, including  _Ike_  of all people, and in bleak nights of insomnia, you can't keep that possibility out. What you know now is what you had known the moment it had first occurred to you that it might someday come to that: that you'd give your life for hers in a heartbeat, but you're not sure you could  _ever_  forgive her for the other way around. (And if that makes you a hypocrite, then so be it. A world without Casey is barely any world at all.)

"I mean, did you even think about how they'll  _feel_ —losing their only child?" you demand.

"They're still young," she forces out without missing a beat, as if she'd rehearsed it. "They can have more kids."

"Yeah, I'm sure that's gonna be their number one priority in the middle of nowhere, legally dead, mourning  _you_." Your arms cross; your chest heaves. She doesn't move. "Look, Casey,  _believe me_ —I get it," you say with some compassion. "I  _get_  wanting nothing more in the entire world than to be able to talk to them and hug them and feel safe for once.  _I get it_ ," you repeat, not flinching away when her gaze crashes into yours. "You fucking  _know_  how happy I am that you actually managed to achieve that—but, Casey, there comes a point when you just gotta  _stop_ , when you've done  _enough_. You're not thinking straight."

Her nostrils flare. "I'm  _thinking_  that I can't fucking  _lose_  them again— _okay_ , Hunter?"

"They're not  _gone!_ " you shout. "They're right  _there_ , wherever you stashed them! They're  _right there!_ "

"And for how long?" she counters. "I granted them  _life_ , not immortality. They can be killed, and then I'll have to do all of this over again, and—"

"And you don't know that!" you scream. "You don't fucking know  _what_  you did, Casey! Just because Hodge told you things worked a certain way, doesn't make them  _true!_ "

"Hunter—"

"And what if they're fucking run over by a truck, huh? Are you gonna do all this over again into eternity? Are you gonna babysit them for the rest of their lives? Oh, wait—you'll be  _dead!_ " Your mouth twists. "You're gonna lose them  _anyway_ , because you'll be  _dead_ , Casey! And what guarantee do you have that Daramount won't still kill them once you're out of the picture?"

"She gave me her word," Casey says. "The Academy  _keeps_  its word. If there's one thing you can trust me on, it's  _that_."

"Oh, yeah, sure—like that time they promised not to kill Abraham and then tried to hire a bunch of assassins to do the job  _for_  them," you remind her, even though you barely ever knew what happened and can't recall it now anyway. The details don't matter. "Like that's just a clause they forgot to put into their original contract. 'Fine, we won't poison the entire population of North America—but we never said we wouldn't  _zombify_  them; now, Mr. President, the keys to the  _other_  secret military base, please.' Congratulations, Casey, that trust is really  _foolproof_."

"Daramount  _wouldn't_ ," she insists. "They're only important because of me; if  _I'm_  gone, then so is their value to the Academy."

Your shoulders tug up for a long second, then drop back down. "Maybe—but they'd still be on the run for the rest of their lives because of what they know, and you wouldn't be able to protect them, and then they wouldn't even have  _you_  in their lives to make up for that." Her presence can make up for a lot, you know from experience. "Is that the kind of life you want them to have? Is that what you've been fighting for all those years?"

"It doesn't matter," she announces, steel in her eyes. "As long as they're alive and safe, nothing else matters."

"' _As long as they're alive'?_ " you repeat, a degree of disgust seeping into the words. " _'Nothing else matters'?!_ Casey, are you even  _listening_  to yourself? You sound like Daramount," you say—then make a face. "Casey, you sound like  _Republicans!_ "

"Then  _go_ ," she urges, voice decked in razors. "Leave me to be a  _horrible_ , illogical daughter and just  _go_ , Hunter!"

You halt mid-step. "What? No. I'm not leaving," you declare. How could she even think you  _would?_

"Why not?" she demands. "Because I can assure you  _right now_ —nothing you're about to say is gonna change my mind. You're wasting your breath and only making this harder."

Your arms fly up. "Well, I would fucking  _hope_  that I'm making this harder! That's really my general agenda here, in case you hadn't noticed," you say. "God, you're so fucking  _stubborn_ , Casey. Always so damn busy saving everyone else. How about you save  _yourself_  for once?" you suggest. "Or, hey, wild thought: step back altogether, let someone  _else_  figure out how to fix this. I'm  _sure_  the sky won't fall down without you to hold it up."

(Not the world's, anyway. Your own personal sky is on the verge of crumbling.)

"That's not gonna happen," she states. She seems to come undone now, too; her being shakes with emotion, though you can't tell which. "Hunter, I'm  _doing_  this—one way or another."

"Argh!" You drag fingers through your own hair and nearly tear some of it out. "When did you give  _up?_  What happened to the Casey that would stop at nothing to make sure  _everybody_  won? That girl got shit  _done!_ " you yell. "But  _you_ — It's like you're not even  _listening_  to me! I just pointed out about a  _billion_  flaws in your logic, and you're still gonna go  _through_  with it?! Even if I pick this plan apart to the very bones—which I'm damn well  _gonna!_ " You punch the air up above you in a wide gesture; your shirt lifts up, and the cylinder's wind scratches over your abdomen. "Like, what, do you  _want_  to die?"

" _Yes!_ " she screams back at you, leaning forward with the force of it.

And the world stops.

Your step falters. Your toes grow cold. This twisted expression feels permanently plastered to your face. You can't make it unwind. You don't try.

That desperate grimace fades from hers. She blinks, once, twice. You feel hollow, as though all your insides were falling out, one by one. They lie in a bloody pile at your feet now. She turns half-away, and you think you see a hand touch her mouth before it goes out of sight. You're still holding your arms high up. They're starting to hurt. You can't lower them.

You've forgotten how to swallow.

"W-What?" you manage weakly. Your voice trembles.

She glances at you for a long second and turns away again with a pained frown. Three times her lips part with a sharp breath, as though she were about to speak, before she finally says, quietly, "Hunter, I didn't mean it like that." She doesn't look at you again.

Your heart contracts with a hard, disorienting beat. A storm rages in your limbs. "How many ways are there to  _mean_  it?"

"Please, just…" Her eyes close. Her lips fold inward. "Just go, Hunter. I'm sorry."

Your arms finally drop back to your sides, aching with strain. You will yourself to inhale, to force the air to barrel through the thick roadblock in your throat. You almost choke in the process, but in the end it flows down to your lungs and settles there—and with it comes a modicum of clarity. "No," you say. "I'm not leaving."

"Hunter—"

"I-I'm sorry I y-yelled," you say, knuckles freezing. The cylinder's breeze irritates your split lip. You don't recall getting one. "I didn't— Casey, we can work  _through_  this," you plead. "I, um— We've broken into Nine's office about a dozen times now; she has to have some—some antidepressants lying around o-or something." You take a cautious step toward her. "I'm sure there's someone qualified to prescribe them around here  _somewhere_." And under your breath, you mutter, "Also, I know where Ike used to stash his weed. I've heard— It's probably still there, if you wanna…"

"That's  _not_  what this is, Hunter," she whispers, peeking at you for a split second again, but suddenly you realize how much darker the ridges above her cheeks have gotten in the last few days, how her skin's seemed to be always coated in chalk, how little you've heard her speak before now.

"Sure, sure," you say, hovering a few feet away. "You're totally fine, right?"

She squeezes, impossibly, even more in on herself. "I didn't say that."

"Casey, why didn't you  _tell_  me?" You crane your head to get a look at her face. "We could've— I could've— You  _can_ —" you correct, utterly lost for words.

This time, an actual snort bursts out of her. (It's a sad, broken sound that cracks you open and pours sand and salt into the fissures.) "There wasn't anything to  _tell_ ," she says, bizarre amusement lifting her words. "Hunter, you  _know_  me—I'm not the type."

"I don't really think there's any  _types_  when it comes to this," you say slowly. "And truth be told, Casey, I'm not sure I know  _anything_  right now."

With a hard swallow, she rotates her feet one by one toward you, and then the rest of her, too. "I'm not depressed," she insists, head lowered, gaze fixed to yours.

"But you're still suicidal." It's neither a conclusion nor a question; like so many things tonight, it doesn't quite belong anywhere.

Her whole being seems to sway infinitesimally forward, as if lost its balance. She breaks your connection upon straightening; her eyes travel away, beyond, behind. "That's not why I'm doing this," she says, an intensity in her brow. "It's just… why I'm not looking for another solution. This way—" She takes a deep breath that seems to run down to her very toes, and then half a chuckle comes out. "This way everybody wins."

"You've got one  _weird_  definition of 'winning'," you mutter, desperately trying to, for once in your life, figure out the right thing to say.

Her mouth tightens and her head lowers, and she stares at the whirring machine next to her for a good long while. "This is why I didn't want to say anything," she finally utters with a sigh. "Now you've got it in your head that there's something to fix and that you can help, and that this can be avoided. And after, you'll wonder whether you could've done more, and you'll blame yourself for letting it happen—but there's nothing you can  _change_ , Hunter," she says, her pale lips barely moving. "This has nothing to do with you. Or me, even."

"Well, what does it have to  _do_  with?" you ask quietly, almost shyly, but it comes out forceful anyway, because you're  _terrified_  of the conviction in her eyes. "What's going on with you, Casey? How could you be so happy and motivated a few days ago and so given up now? What  _changed_?"

"It's— It doesn't matter. And you wouldn't believe me anyway, so…"

"What, because I've never believed a single word you've said?" You reach tentatively out for her shoulder. "Come on, try me. Please," you say. "I want to understand."

"No, you don't." She lays her palm atop yours in a gentle gesture. "And nor  _should_  you—but you don't. Want to understand, I mean. You want to  _fix_  it," she explains, and you know as well as she does in that moment that it's the absolute one hundred percent truth. "It can't be fixed, Hunter."

"Why  _not?_ " you demand, a hint of desperation seeping through to push down the approaching tears. "What  _is_  it?"

"Hunter,  _please_." Her chin bunches. "I don't want to hurt you any more than I have to," she whispers. Tears coat her voice in jagged ridges.

"And I appreciate that, seriously, you have no idea, but… Look, Casey, whatever you think will 'hurt me'—even if it's that you've been sneaking around with the whole school behind my back and our entire relationship was a giant prank— _believe me_ , not knowing is worse," you say. That's the kind of stuff you'd be imagining anyway, no matter how irrelevant to this situation. "Please, just…  _trust_  me."

"It's not  _about_  trust," she says, eyes trying to convey something you cannot decipher. "I trust you more than anyone here; you should  _know_  that by now."

"Then  _tell_  me."

And you hold her gaze when it deepens and softens, when she seems to evaluate you in a measurement system you are wholly unfamiliar with. You squeeze her hand and try, with all your might in every cell, to pass it, to be good enough, to be worthy of the things she holds within. Finally, her head shakes infinitesimally but not in denial, and she says, "I wouldn't— I don't even know where to begin."

"Start at the beginning," you urge, teetering on the edge of what might be hope. (Wild, dangerous hope.) "When did you start feeling like this?"

"I—" She looks away, runs a hand through her hair. Surrenders. "It was right after I did the— when I brought my parents back," she says. "I didn't notice at first because there was so much going on, but it was there, and it's been getting stronger every fucking  _hour_  since then, and I'm just— I'm buckling under that weight, Hunter. I don't know how much more I can take."

"Of what?" you ask, guiding her down to the floor. Her palm is freezing in yours. " _What_  was there? What  _happened?_ "

Sitting cross-legged, she takes a breath—and then abruptly, fiercely deflates. "I shouldn't be tellin—"

"Casey, come  _on_ ," you plead, squeezing. She turns away, downward.

Her gaze lingers on your intertwined hands in her lap as she searches for the words. "Something… broke," she finally says. "Within me. Some of the illusions and the lies—they just fell away. I… I learned the  _truth_  of what we are." The last word barely makes it out of her mouth before dissipating.

"…Isn't that a  _good_  thing _?_ " You duck your head to search for her eyes. "What did you find out? What have they been hiding from us?"

She shakes her head with rapid movements. Her curls bounce as if they had minds of their own. "You don't understand, Hunter. They didn't  _create_  these illusions," she says, and finally looks at you once more. The raw pain in her gaze stuns you. " _We_  did. To  _protect_  ourselves."

"But why would we…?" You feel your features mushing together in confusion as you try to extract the meaning her words are so loaded with, still just slightly out of reach. Then it dawns on you—it's not why, but from  _what_. "Casey… How  _bad_  is it?" you ask, unease crawling up your spine. What could be so bad that not knowing is better than living through  _this_?

A part of you feels as though you already know the answer.

"Not bad," she corrects, voice frail somehow. "Just… really hard to live with. Which I guess is the point," she says with a bitter chuckle, "since as far as I can tell, me remembering wasn't some mistake or a price to pay for bringing them back. It was specifically  _designed_  to happen—a failsafe, in case I survived past achieving my objective."

You stare down at your knee for a second—and then two, and then three. "I'm not following."

For a moment you're sure she's about bow out again, to push you away and let those questions linger there forever while she goes and _dies_. But she only frowns at the floor for a long while and asks, "Do you know what happens in games once you win, Hunter?" The words sound hollow. You briefly wonder whether she thinks you've never  _won_  one, and then get sidetracked trying to remember the last time you  _did_. (You cannot remember anything beyond the unbeatable team that is Hannah and Esi.) "They  _end_ ," she explains. Her cadence makes you want to shiver. "You don't just keep playing; there's no  _point_."

"Well, I mean in  _some_ —"

Her fingers rise to your mouth. The skin there tingles at the contact, even despite everything. "I'm not trying to debate video games with you, Hunter."

But you can't resist adding, through her hand, "There's also sandbox games." It comes out garbled. "Most of those can't be won at all."

"Good for them," she says and removes her palm, "but in the game  _we're_  playing, there's a very specific predetermined goal in every life," she explains, twisting the creases of her dress, "and the moment it's achieved, our time here is over. I  _did_  it. I  _saved_  my parents." She smiles as the first tear falls down. The sight twists your lungs. "This is my reward for that—a guarantee that I won't get…  _ridiculous_  ideas in my head about building a life outside this, or trying to find happiness again." Splat, splat. "That I won't keep on playing beyond the main mission."

"Casey, you're starting to freak me out," you say, as though she hasn't been doing that all night—or possibly ever since you first met her. "What's this big darn horrible truth? Am I gonna have to pull it out of you with pincers?"

"You don't want to—"

"Yes, I fucking  _do_ , okay?" you snap, and then immediately sink back down with a small sigh, remorseful. Your thumb caresses her hand. "Just… spare me the melodramatics and the inevitable, 'you just don't get it, do you?' moment, Casey. Spit it out already."

She wets her lips and wipes her nose, and holds the back of her palm to her forehead for a moment before saying, with half a chortle, "I'm sorry—I can't really think of a way to say this without sounding like a Wise Old Man, long beard and all." Sombering, she bites the inside of her lip, looks you in the eye. "The  _truth_ , Hunter, is that we're not  _human_ —and we never  _have_  been."

The unmistakable weight of the words astounds you, though you can't fully comprehend them. There's a solemnity to her voice, a kind of anchoring that echoes in her gaze, too, and it makes the rest of everything float away somehow. As the seconds tick away, the world turns sharp and gray and still around you, and silence no longer sounds the way it's supposed to, and all through it your eyes never leave hers, not for a second. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you notice yourself trying to decipher whether the tingly emptiness slowly falling over you consists of world-shattered shock or a vague feeling that that's not really  _news_  at this point.

(You might not exactly be a werewolf or a psychic, but it's been pretty clear for a while now that you're  _something_.)

Your default reaction to a blank mind has in recent months become paying tribute to iconic sitcom moments, and so within moments you're halfway to yelling, "That is  _brand new information!_ " and seeing whether what comes out is sarcastic or not—but she continues before you can.

"They've been calling us special," she says, looking away. "The chosen ones.  _Gods_." A small chuckle. "Thing is, they're  _right_. We don't belong here. This isn't our home." She pulls a long shrug—it contains a lot less confusion than it does hopelessness. "Hunter, this isn't our  _world_."

Still adjusting to the bleakness holding your body hostage, you drag a hand through your hair; it ends up on the nape of your neck. "Are we talking, like,  _aliens_ , or…?"

"No," she firmly declares—then makes a face. "I mean, not really. It's just sort of beyond human comprehension. Ironic use of the term given what I just said, I know," she adds, and for a glimmer of a moment the Casey you know shines through, but then she goes back to the pallid, frail mass of sorrow you were holding in your arms a moment ago. "We're not exactly the green, tiny, kidnap-you-in-your-sleep type, is what I'm saying."

"Then what  _are_  we?" you ask, and despite yourself, you feel a genuine curiosity budding within.

"Higher," she says, as if she couldn't explain it any better than that. A small, serene smile blossoms as her eyes glaze over, almost like the lights of angels were shining on her face. It still somehow looks sad to you. "So much  _higher_. We're bound to time and space for as long as we're here, but, really, we exist outside it. It's like… Like if you had spent your whole life in some hole too small to stand up or stretch out in, never able to walk or run."

"Like Plato's cave," you mutter.

She nods slowly. "It's so strange to look at it from the perspective of this place. To humans, we really  _would_  be omnipotent, but to us it's just the way the universe works. Time isn't linear. Matter can easily be in two places at once, or occupy the same space as something else. The speed of light is far from the fastest. Everything I know about physics is… wrong," she says, letting out an empty snort. "All that time I spent trying to understand it, and it's just… useless."

"No, come on, don't say that." You rub small circles on her palm. "I mean, I don't know about you, but I haven't really been seeing many time warps around here. Flammable snow notwithstanding," you add, and it gets a tiny smile out of her. "I'm guessing we don't have all that huge, mind-boggling power here and things still work the usual way—the one that you've always been so passionate about," you say. "Sciences have changed life for everyone on this planet time and time again; that's not  _useless_ , Casey."

"Doesn't matter," she whispers. "None of this…  _matters_  in the big picture. Not really."

You play with your intertwined fingers as another hot tear lands on them; your thumb wipes it away from her cold skin. You wish you could pull her closer, to somehow take it all away and make everything better, but you don't know how. You don't know what you could possibly  _do_  to fix this.

"You, uhm… You never said why it was so hard to live with." Her breath catches as you try to swallow, for courage. "Why does it  _hurt_  so much?" you ask, completely certain that you're about to hear something you really, honestly don't want to.

She's quiet for a long time, head downcast, and you wonder whether she even has an answer she could give you.

Finally, she takes a breath and says, "Because I  _remember_." Her voice is soft. You've never heard so much fondness and pain contained in so few words all at once. "I remember all the lives I've lived, all the horrible things I've done—all the horrible, horrible things I've had done to  _me_. All the pain and the loss, and how long and  _inevitable_  it all felt at the time. And then I… I remember what it was like, back  _home_."

Her face twists, and now it's no longer the silent tears that paint her face, but an onslaught of shaky, sobbing ones. You brush her shoulder slowly. And though it unnerves you, you can't deny that deep within your bones, with some sense neuroscientists likely have no name or precedent for, you know all the things coming out of her mouth—and some that haven't yet, some that never will—to be true.

"I remember the light, and the love, and the  _ease_  with which we lived," she continues, a knot in her throat. "I remember the place I  _belong_  to, where I cannot return even if there was a way to. I remember who I am and what I  _should_  be—what I  _can't_  be." She trembles, her faraway gaze seeing things you can't even imagine. "Home isn't a person or a place, but a feeling you can't get back, right?" she says, quoting a song you've only heard three times, each a treasured memory of hushed sharing of her iPod's earbuds in some dark, remote corner. Something between a chuckle and a whimper escapes her. "We  _can't_  get it back, not anymore, and that absence is just— We're blind echoes now, thinking that we're whole, until we remember that we're not." The words spill out in a flurry now. "And, god, I wish I could just— I wish I could forget, I wish I could never have found out about  _any_  of this, I wish I could just go back to how it was before, because knowing— _remembering_ —everything we're forbidden from being and what we're  _forced_  to be is like— like—" Her breathless gasps cut at you. "Like—do you remember Buffy?" she asks suddenly, facing you. "When she was resurrected?"

There is nothing more potent she could've said; your heart drops to your stomach the moment the words are out. "Casey…" you gasp out, and pull her into a hug at once. The shoulder of your shirt soaks within seconds.

"It's a thousand times  _worse_  than that," she sobs out against your neck. "We're  _more_  than this; we're more than the destruction and the war, the  _human being_  stuff. But we're trapped. Hunter, everyone knows that this world is a shitty place where shitty things go to happen, but there's just— I— N-Nobody can even imagine how much of a  _punishment_  it really is." And though it's only been seconds, she draws back, face splotchy and red, as though she physically couldn't say this without looking at you. "It's a  _prison_ , Hunter," she says through glassy, bloodshot eyes. "An honest-to-god  _prison_  for our kind."

A chill spasms through you. "Wh— For… F-For  _all_  of us? As in  _criminals?_ " Your hands start to tremble and shake; you clench them into fists, away from her sight. "What— What did we  _do_?"

You see her slacken and melt at the words, and the way her eyes fog up knots your stomach, and she sinks back to you as though she couldn't hold herself up anymore. "Something for which there are no words in this world," she whispers at last—and she must have felt you tense, terrified at yourself, because the next thing she says is, "I don't mean like some unspeakable evil and atrocity, Hunter, relax. There's just… no reference point here. No way I could possibly explain."

"Oh," you mutter. Exhale. "Oh, okay. That was kind of misleading." But you do still wonder.

"Sorry," she whispers against your collarbone, and you feel like an asshole for nitpicking at a time like this. "It doesn't matter," she repeats. " _This_  is our reality now. We've been here for as long as humanity has—and we'll continue to be here until it dies out and we have nowhere else to go. That's the point of the reincarnation cycle," she says easily. "Humans only get one shot at life, but, though we are bound to their bodies, we are immortal. We cannot be killed by any weapon found or created here. We just… Start over. Again, and again, and again, until our sentence is over."

"Wait, so, that— That's the entire reason?" you ask. "Because we need somewhere to  _respawn_?" So many long centuries of wondering, so many lives dedicated to finding that answer… You almost want to laugh.

She  _does_ —a bitter, cruel sound. "I don't think they meant it to be like this—with the Academy and their predecessors. It was supposed to be a learning experience. Us leading out the same shitty lives as everyone else, never even realizing how shitty they are, or that we're different at all. They're not cruel enough to do this on purpose—but I guess they didn't account for human greed when they sent us here," she says, a hard edge in her voice. "Humans only get one life," she repeats.

"…And we're immortal," you continue, the puzzle slowly starting to make sense.

She nods slowly. "These bodies—our vessels, so to speak—can restrict a lot of our true power, but not everything. It's little glimpses—to see things that haven't happened yet and others that never did, to implant or steal thoughts, to travel in time. We each end up with a small piece of the whole—a little bit different in every life and often overlapping with someone else's," she says, sounding remarkably like a guide book. "That's why nobody here has exactly the same gifts, you know, even if they seem almost identical at first glance. There are no hard-and-fast rules to how that happens—and, Hunter, between all the hundreds of us, I don't think we amount to even a  _quarter_  of what each of us really is alone."

And for a moment, as your eyes fix to the small cracks in the cement below, you see beyond just  _her_  pain—you see everyone who will still be trapped here, maimed and tortured, no matter how this night turns out. People you care about, people whose lives are immediate and urgent and  _important_ —even if there's some bigger picture where that entire lifetime is just a second's worth. "Casey… If we're really that powerful, then why haven't we  _won_  yet?"

"I don't know," she whispers. "We've all been scattered for so long before now, and we usually die young without a real chance to pass whatever little we've discovered on—but I wouldn't be surprised if the people responsible for all this mess had, like, secret orders all the way back in the middle ages. Thousands of members, private libraries… who knows what they came up with. Maybe their upper hand is simply knowing a hell of a lot more than we do." She exhales roughly and lifts a hand to wipe her face. "I don't really have the answers, Hunter."

"But you know so much," you protest. "Even if it's… hard."

"I would think you'd know from experience that having your eyes opened doesn't magically make you understand everything," she points out with a sad smile. "With this, too, I can only remember what I've ever actually  _known_ —and even then, it's all so vague. As soon as I try to put most of it into conscious thoughts, it's just… Poof, gibberish." She gesticulates sharply and lets her hands slap hard against her strained thighs. "None of this information can help you in any way besides satisfying some morbid sci-fi curiosity, Hunter; I don't understand this game we're all playing any better than I did last week—I just see beyond the board itself now."

"No, come on, you've said loads of useful things already," you say. "I bet there's a lot more you just haven't thought of."

She closes her eyes, shakes her head. "Patronization isn't going to fix anything," she mutters. "The only thing I really know for sure is that it's gonna be pointless to try to break the cycle; you don't have that kind of power here. The most you can hope to do is to throw 'our  _servants_ ' out of it—" there's distinct venom on her tongue "—and try to go back to the normal lives everyone was supposed to have. Maybe not in this life, but the next."

Your heart gives a dull lurch when she doesn't include herself in that. Suddenly you remember, though you can't say you'd forgotten, what she was about to do when you had come in.

"Casey." You take great care in grasping her hands in yours and will your voice not to shake. "You… You said that you wanted to forget. The things you found out. Ignorance is bliss, and all that." She's already giving you a look that almost borders on the pitying, but you  _have_  to get this out, if only to be able to say that you'd tried. "What if you  _could?_ " you insist, almost in a whisper. "What if we could find some way to just—take it all back? Or wipe it. Or whatever. And, and, and… You could stay here—and we could all end this together; and after, we could go try to figure out how to be in the regular world again. And you could go be with your parents—"

"It doesn't work like that," she says quietly.

"But how do you—"

"I just  _do_ , okay?" It's not a snap. It sounds defeated more than anything. "I can't explain it, but I just— I know that this is a big thing. Maybe bigger than anything else any of us have ever done. Whatever you have in mind—hypnosis, brainwash, using someone's mind powers on me—it wouldn't work. If my parents  _died_  again, that wouldn't bring back my mystical life's purpose and erase all this. It wouldn't change anything; I already did it once," she says. "You're not supposed to be able to undo a  _failsafe_ , Hunter."

"But what abou—?"

Her shoulders sag. "Hunter!"

"No, but can't the cylinder do  _anything?_ " you demand. "Anything in the entire world?" Tears spark in the corners of your eyes. You'd  _known_  she'd have a reason for doing this, you'd fucking  _known_ —because she is Casey, and she always thinks things through, and that's what you'd been  _afraid_  of. Against your will, against everything you've ever wanted, it's starting to sink in that maybe you cannot stop her—that maybe it would be cruel to  _try_. "I mean, why can't we just—"

"I don't  _want_  to know what kind of price that would take," she says, eyes darkening. Her gaze leaves no room for questions. "You're right; maybe it  _would_  work. But I doubt one death would be enough—maybe not even dozens. This is a big thing, and I  _won't_ —" She cuts off and works to steady her breathing.

Your head shakes so slightly you barely even feel it as your brow contracts and chin puckers up; you clench down to keep it all in. Your heart won't stop pounding. You've only been this terrified once in your life, when your father had come by the hospital bench you'd fallen asleep on and frowned at you for a full minute before sitting down on the opposite side, the lines of his face deepened into the oldest you'd ever seen him in your life—or in the years since.

"There  _has_  to be another way," you mutter as the first tear spills over.

And now  _she's_  the one to reach out, to hold your cheek in her palm. "I want to stay," she says; the yearning in her voice sends a sharp pang through your chest. "I wish I could—but, Hunter, I don't think I  _can_. This is what I'm supposed to do; I feel it in my bones. This is how my life was meant to go."

You shake your head again, fiercely now. "I don't believe that, Casey. I  _can't_. You deserve better than that. That things were meant to go like this—to take so much away from you and never give anything back—is just…  _No_." Your whole body shakes now. "There has to be a loophole," you force out through gritted teeth. "There just  _has_  to. A world that wouldn't allow you the chance to be happy and safe is… I-It's  _wrong_. And I want no part of it."

"And I'm lucky for that," she says, lips curving into the closest thing to a genuine smile you've seen all night. She glances at your slack hands below and slowly, carefully lays both of hers on your shoulders. Tears form in her eyes as she shuffles to kneel in front of you, almost towering. You straighten up instinctively. She takes a deep breath and gazes straight at you. "This was  _real_ , Hunter," she says. Her voice breaks halfway.

Though the words should make you elated, your heart finds a way to fall. "Don't say that like you're saying goodbye."

Casey bites her lip, and in her eyes you see so much more than she could ever say. "This was real and I  _need_  you to know that," she repeats, voice remarkably tenacious for how weak it must sound. (Somehow, you think it'd be easier to deal with her leaving it hadn't been. If this relationship had all been a big lie. A betrayal instead of a sacrifice.) "Whatever happens next, whatever doubts you get… I wanted to stay here—with you. Don't you dare  _ever_  forget that."

And her fingers shift to twist in the back of your hair, and she pulls you closer, and her cold lips press against yours. They're wet with her tears and a bit puffed up like the rest of her face, but they still feel like peace and like home and like all the other good things you've ever forgotten you had. Your hands travel to her waist, wrap around her back—and without meaning to, you've pulled her into a hug. You hold her as close as you can, for as long as you can, and you could swear that the beat of her heart syncs to your own. (Or, more likely, yours to hers.)

She doesn't stop kissing you—the more time that passes, the more desperately she seems to go about it. With the one small part that can still think among this assault of emotion from all sides, you almost wish she did. It doesn't feel right to do that in this kind of scene, when your whole being is spasming, when every word you've said has been about her imminent death, when so much of your world has been turned upside down in so little time, but then it dawns on you—why she hasn't seemed to draw in a breath in about two minutes.

This may very well be the last kiss the two of you ever share.

Your insides clench at the thought, and your knees might've wobbled if she weren't holding onto you so tightly. And then—because you are no fool, and you won't let your stupid,  _baseless_  optimism give you a lifetime of regret—you push yourself up and take her face in your palms and bare your soul for her as thoroughly as you can, as though neither of you ever had to let go, as though you would become fused. Your legs are numb from sitting on them for so long, and you're both crying through the burning fire so that everything tastes like salt, and it's all so very unlike the stolen moments in broom closets you'd come to consider the best part of your day—but it  _means_  something.

It  _means_  something to you, and it must have meant something to  _her_ —and when later, so much later, her iron grip on your wrists loosens and the two of you break apart only because neither of you can seem to handle any more, you feel changed down to your very molecules. (Though inevitable, this separation comes an eternity too soon.)

She rests her face against yours for a long moment, eyes closed, breathing shallow. Once, her head tugs up and her lips find your cool forehead to hold themselves there, pressed so close that it makes you ache throughout. And then, without another word, she rises upright and steps past you, toward the cylinder. Your hand slips out of hers.

You're left kneeling on a hard cement floor with water-stained cheeks, still trying to catch all the breath that she'd stolen from you. You sag forward, powerless. The door is right in front of you. If you wanted, you could take the fifteen or so steps to it and wander through the labyrinth beyond back to your bed and forget this ever happened, like you've forgotten so much else. You could leave her, before she leaves you.

Instead, your head whips around to ascertain that, if only for a moment longer, she is still there—still  _here_. She stands with her back to you, hugging herself, her silhouette sharp against the bright light of the cylinder. The picture looks exactly as it had when you came in—and yet everything's different now. You scramble to your feet, a peculiar brand of antsy emptiness reigning in your chest.

You still don't know what to say.

"Casey, please don't do this," comes out of your mouth before you can stop it. No logic, no guilt, no anger. You've never asked anything of her like this, when there is nothing to back the claim up but your bare wish. "I'm— I'd give anything to make everything b—" You take a sharp breath between your haphazard sobs. "Just please  _wait_. At least until morning. H-However long you can," you stammer out, though you've started to shake throughout. "Sedated, if that's easier. We can, all of us, find  _something_ …"

You know the answer before your words even reach her. "I'm sorry," she says, so quietly that you barely hear at all.

And you want to take it all back, to apologize for even bringing up something of that magnitude let alone demand it of her— _god_ , the things you said to her twenty minutes ago—but you were always taught that nothing is too late until someone's in the grave, and… she's _not_ the one who's gonna have to live with this decision for the rest of her life.  _She_  gets to have a clean slate somewhere far away.

To forget this—and forget  _you_.

"I'm _begging_  you." Your face is so twisted, so coated in tears that you can't even tell whether you're saying it right. The sharp wind from the cylinder's spin cuts at your damp skin like razors. "I'm begging you, I'm begging you, I'm begging you." All dignity abandoned at your feet, you whisper the words over and over again until they blur together, until they become barely but a breath, until you don't have the strength to face her back anymore. She stays exactly where she is, and you don't approach her. Can't. " _I'm begging you_ ," you breathe, lips sticking to each other.

She takes a determined step forward, toward the light. Your entire being freezes and jolts simultaneously.

"Casey, I  _love_  you."

It comes out panicked and broken, like the last weapon left in your arsenal, the last hope you still have—a futile one, because a very distinct part of you says it knowing that you'll never get another chance. And though they succeed in halting her, if only for another two seconds, you regret the words as soon as they're out. This wasn't how it was supposed to happen. You didn't hold them in for so long as something  _pure_  and  _precious_  and  _important_   just to throw them at her because you had nothing  _better_.

Her head turns slowly back toward you, and for a moment something within you surges at the thought that maybe this did it, that she'll stay, that everything will turn out okay. (The smallest, tiniest,  _loudest_  part of you hopes she's about to say something back.) But her gaze is pained when it connects with yours, and her cheeks glisten.

Her stare lingers on you in silence for a long time, perhaps longer than either of you know; somehow it makes you feel smaller with every second. A few times, her lips part—and then the weight of the unsaid lingers behind her eyes as she swallows whatever it was back down. (You stop wondering whether it's what you wish it were after the third time her mouth closes and shuts your heart off with it.) Bit by bit, that anxious restlessness subsides, and eventually you feel dried out, as though you had no more tears left in you.

"We'll meet again," she promises at last, though you can see it's not what she'd been trying to get out. "We always do."

And perhaps you can seek solace in that, in the certainty no doubt brought about by memories of hundreds or thousands of lifetimes in which you have, indeed, always "done"—but somehow this confirmation of the connection you'd felt between the two of you the moment you saw her doesn't make you feel anything but grief for the endless times you've had to part.

All you see is your own life stretching out before you—long, despite all the gunshots that have wounded you at one point or another; numb, despite all the recent months during which you've learned not to lock all the bad stuff away because then the good stuff disappears, too; powerful, despite the persistent sensation that you'll always be useless, never amounting to anything of value.

You don't see any Casey there. Only a gaping Casey-shaped hole that nothing could ever fill.

"It's not the same," you say, but there is no malice in the words. You cannot muster up the strength to be destroyed by hope anymore. "Whoever you're about to become… you won't be you." The shape of her Cupid's bow; the scar running along the tip of her index finger; the way she laughs when she doesn't want to but can't help it; the way her tongue wraps around your name. None of these things will follow her. "If we ever do meet again… We won't be  _us_."

Her gaze lowers; it makes you ache. "Maybe that's for the best," she whispers.

You want to know what she means by that. To know that, and everything else, an infinity of it. So much has been left unasked because somehow you always assumed, even despite the circumstances, that you'd have more time. (So much has been left untold because you'd been weak, because you'd been a coward, because you'd wanted to wait until the words flowed easily on your tongue instead of drowning you before they would ever get to her.) Now she'll be gone in a moment and you'll never get to ask her what her first memory was, or where her favorite place is, or what the date inscription on one of her necklaces refers to.

The questions flood your brain, too many to make sense of—so many more than you'd thought you'd have ready—and before you can pick out the most important one, the one you'll never forgive yourself for not asking, she chuckles and says, "See you in another life, brotha."

You think you're supposed to laugh, to let the mood lighten, to say it back and send her off with a grin over all the time you  _did_  get to spend together. And maybe you would, if it were anyone else. "You're not allowed to quote  _Lost_  at me right now," you say instead; you're not sure why. Perhaps you just want something in your life to be separate from fiction, to remain unmarred by make-belief and pretend, as though that would make it realer somehow.

"Giles, I'm sixteen years old," she says without missing a beat, and suddenly you wish she'd stuck with the last one. "I don't wanna die."

This you let her have.

She turns back to the light, away from you, and tucks a few strands of her hair behind her ear, as if that still mattered when all of it, all of  _her_ , is about to cease existing. You're a few steps away, swollen and freezing—and tired, because it  _is_  the middle of the night, despite all this hurt and anxiety—and you don't use this moment to go to her side once more and envelop her in the tight embrace your arms are yearning so strongly for; you stay exactly where you are, trying to memorize everything about in her in the little time you have left.

For the first time in your life, you truly understand what defeat feels like.

"I think I was wrong," she blurts out suddenly, unexpectedly. Her fingers twist in front of her, only partially hidden from your view. "I should've said goodbye. I'm sorry I wasn't going to," she says. "I'm glad we got to have this." Hair whips around her head, hiding even the barest glimpse of her face from you. "Thanks for coming, Hunter."

Such a strange thing to thank for. "Sure, whatever," you say, and because you don't know what to do with your hands, you stuff them into the pockets of the  _Toy Story_  pajama pants you've had since you were eleven.

"How  _did_  you know to come here?" she asks, and it sounds remarkably like the last bit of curiosity to satisfy, just for the sake of it.

"Uhh…" You actually have to work to remember. It seems like a lifetime ago, when you feel as though you've changed irreparably in the last half hour. "Hodge dragged me out of bed. Told me you were going through with the ultimatum and to go here or I'd regret it." The nape of your neck feels too hot; you place a palm there to cool it down. Fingers tangle in your hair on the way, and suddenly you realize that the last moments you'll ever have with the destined love of your life were just spent with acute and chaotic bedhead. Perfect. "I don't think she wanted you to do it, to be honest," you say slowly, absentmindedly smoothing down the tufts—just in case she spares you one more glance. "Maybe she thought I could stop you."

You almost want to laugh at the thought—at your own hope, too. Nobody's ever been able to talk Casey out of anything. Only fools get in her way.

She nods slowly, automatically. You wonder if she's entered some kind of trance. "I wonder how  _she_  knew," she says, but there is very little interest in the words. It just sounds like something to say, something to fill the silence with for another second; in her breaths, in her fidgeting, in her  _stalling_  you finally figure out that she wants this next part to happen even less than you do—if such a thing were even possible.

"How does Hodge know anything," you mutter, kicking some imaginary pebble and devoting your utmost attention to it. You're not sure you can even feel your chest anymore, but you're nevertheless almost certain that it will never stop aching again. Another paradox, to feel so little and so much at once. (In time, you may turn out to be made not of flesh and bone, but just of that ache. You would be held upright not by muscle but the sheer force of its cruelty.) "Maybe she saw it in your file."

"Maybe." Her fists clench at her sides. "Hunter?"

"Yeah."

"Tell Jade I love her," she breathes.

There's nothing in her voice to indicate so, but you think she's crying again. Your stomach twists at the sentiment your last remaining friend of those you had come here with will get that you didn't. (Who will be the last man standing, you wonder—you or Jade? Will it matter, when you'll both have lost everyone else?) It spasms again at the guilt that follows. You have no right to be jealous.

"And that she's strong enough to protect herself," she continues. "And that I wish I could've come through on my promise to get her out."

You don't ask why she can't go back upstairs and tell Jade herself, if this goodbye had worked out so  _wonderfully_. "Sure thing." You don't add that you'd do anything for her. She must know, after all this time. You take a deep breath.

"Thank you," she says, and then, quieter: "For everything."

And with a breath of her own, Casey takes the last two steps toward the cylinder's spinning light and holds her hand out to it.

The gigantic device starts to hum and whir in the opposite direction it usually does; its bright blue light expands and swallows Casey whole. You're still trying to decide between all the crucial things you never thought you wouldn't get to tell her, or ask her, or do with her, still trying to call upon whatever precognition you have to infer what your future self will likely wish every day he'd thought to do in this moment, when  _you_  still can—but right then, when with a sharp jolt you know that she's about to be gone, forever, in another second or two, you abruptly realize that all the haphazard, disjointed wondering is pointless, because your true decision—the only one that really matters—was made a long time ago.

( _"You can be there when she needs you,"_  someone you're no longer quite sure was real had said, all that time ago. Does it count as deja vu  _now?_ )

Feet scrambling and tripping, you jump the few yards to her side and grab her other hand harder than you've ever held onto anything in your entire life. Your cheek crashes into the machine from the force of this movement, but that's okay—and as the light swallows you up alongside her, you slam your fist against the vibrating metal for good measure.

"Wh—!" Her golden head whips around in the instant that's left. The choked terror in her eyes may haunt you forever, if forever will still exist for you in a moment, but you only find it in yourself to smile gently down at her as you command the cylinder to override her request with yours.

Perhaps yesterday you would've thought this an infringing on her wishes and her decisions—something you've never ever wanted to do—but not anymore. You're not keeping her from something she wants; you're giving her a way out of something she  _doesn't_. For once in your life, you're fighting for what  _you_  do.

Wind blasts against your face, so sharply that it might peel the skin right off. Your raised hand bruises and bloodies against the spinning contraption, though it had only managed to scrape your cheek before you'd jerked your head jerked away. You continue pushing yourself forward into the contact despite the searing pain—because what you  _want_  is for Casey to be alive, what you  _want_  is for her to be safe, what you desire more than almost  _anything else in the entire world_  is for her to be fucking  _happy_.

And when—two seconds after you'd lurched yourself at the cylinder that will probably kill you—everything around you starts shaking and spinning and finally explodes into a white nothing, you're more sure than ever that you're willing to give everything you've ever had for that. Whatever this colossal cost is, it'll be worth it. (Whatever it is, it'll be a measly  _fraction_  of what you're willing to give.)

The loud silence punches at your eardrums. The whiteness blinds your every sense.

It all falls away—and then so do you.

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Wake up.  _Wake up_ ," someone chants. "Please, oh god— Wake  _up!_  Come on—please—please.  _Please_ …"

The voice is filled with tears. Some of them land on you.

"You're not dead—you can't be  _dead_ —god, Hunter,  _please wake up_."

You're being shaken.

"Wake up.  _Wake up_. For me, for… For… For everyone… Please…  _Please_ …"

The smallest of groans escapes you, from somewhere that feels decidedly  _not_  where your mouth should be—but also from exactly where it's always been.

"Oh my g—" she gasps out with a hard sob. Her grip on you falters. "Yes,  _yes_ , you can do it—thank god—yes, come on, Hunter, just keep breathing, please, come on—in and out, in and out, yes, just like that. In, out." She breathes deeply through her words—to set an example, though it sounds like she needs the steadiness a lot more than you do; her shivering gasps send ice trickling through your veins. "You're gonna be okay," she promises, more to herself than to you, or at least you think so, because somehow it doesn't feel like you  _need_  the assurance. "Can you open your eyes?"

It almost sounds like a challenge, like you have something to  _prove_  to her—and when within moments you crack your lids apart just a smidge, golden locks fill your vision, framing a splotchy, relieved face that smiles down on you from above.

"Are you okay?" Casey whispers, very much alive.

You're lying on the hardest surface you've ever felt while pebbles of concrete dig roughly into your back; some invisible force seems to be flattening your skull down against it with the approximate pressure of ocean depths. The aggressive sound of that damn cylinder's spin a few yards away thrums painfully in your ears, and you feel as though you'll die if your eyes open beyond the narrowest sliver to let the light in. Something particularly wet coats your upper lip; you, naturally, assume that it's snot from your earlier crying bout—or, possibly, the common cold you feel coming on from all this wind—but when you wet your lips just to get reacquainted with the feeling, they taste like blood.

"I-I think so," you groan out and try to lift yourself up to your elbows. She reaches out to help you, but her hands aren't much steadier. "Nrgh. What happened?"

"You were a fucking  _idiot_  is what happened," she utters with a grimace, moments before her mouth presses sloppily to yours. (The stillness of your nerves should've been the first red flag, if you had looked harder.) She gives you one warm, blurry peck after another, and another, and  _another_ , as if she couldn't get enough, couldn't ever  _imagine_  getting enough—until finally you're pulled into a tight hug that lasts for more breaths than a first-grader could count.

With every single one of them, you feel her pulling you closer and closer, almost to—or maybe well past, you can't really tell—the point of pain.

Your hand rises to her back out of habit, exactly as it has hundreds of times before—but you don't press her tightly against yourself; you don't bury your head into the crook of her shoulder and drown in the hair that always smells like something you've never been able to identify; you don't slam your eyes shut and fix your entire mind onto the feel of the warm, incredible girl in your arms. You're a bit too preoccupied with wondering  _why_  you don't to go and do any of it.

And then it rushes back to you, in a wave as sudden and instantaneous as you had once realized that you would eventually fall in love with Casey Blevins—where you are, why you're here, and the last, white memory.

"Did it work?" you ask, but there is no urgency to the words, no life-or-death element that will  _break_  you if it didn't. They hold, perhaps, even less investment than her final questions to  _you_  had.

The quiet sobs in her chest that you had stopped noticing were still there slowly quiet until the only sound in the vast silence is the hum of metal so close yet so far away. Breath held, Casey releases her grip on you and pulls back; there's a fresh coating of tears she wipes with the back of her hand absentmindedly, but then she looks you in the eye—and  _smiles_.

"Yeah, Hunter. It worked," she says, a great tenderness in her eyes. "I can remember remembering all those things, but they're… gone. That weight is  _gone_ ," she repeats. "I can barely even _imagine_ it being so bad that I would—" Her lips tighten; she doesn't seem to be able to meet your gaze anymore. "I guess now it's time to look for those other solutions you were yelling at me about," she offers with a breathless laugh; it's the most genuine sound you've heard out of her in days. (You notice this involuntarily, not because you're trying to.)

She clasps one of your hands in hers and, lips trembling, looks you in the eye again with some graveness. "Nothing I could ever say or do would be enough of a thank you," she says slowly, quietly. Her eyes well up once more, and she wipes this water quickly away before it has a chance to spill over. "Nothing that I could d— Nothing could ever make you understand how much of a  _gift_  you just gave me. Whatever happens next, however my life turns out from this point on…  _Nothing_ ," she repeats.

Her thumbs knead your hands, and for a moment she seems too choked up to even speak. You wait for more tears to come out of her; they don't. (Something within you whispers that this is what you'd been hoping for, that it had all been worth it to get this moment in return. It's a very quiet voice.)

"But I'm not gonna thank you," she announces suddenly, voice steady and sure. Her jaw clenches. "That was th-the  _stupidest_  thing you've ever done, Hunter—and you fucking  _know_  how many stupid things you've done. I was just convinced you were  _dead_  for ten fucking minutes." It comes out in almost a hiss. "Like, god, how could you think I would  _possibly_  be okay with  _losing_  you like that? What the fuck was going through your  _head?_ " she demands.

You brush a hand through your hair and abruptly find that the flesh is still raw from being pressed to a moving surface for so long. "Ten?" is all you ask. It had all felt like much less than that—mere seconds.

"Maybe five," she allows. " _Way_  longer than I'm comfortable with, anyway.  _You_  try waking up in this creepy room to find out it's been hours since your last memory and that your boyfriend is cold and bleeding unconscious on the floor." Her hand tightens around your knee. "See how well  _you_  deal with that."

You glance at your watch automatically. It says what it always does.

"No, it  _is_  actually eight-thirteen right now, believe it or not," she says though a chuckle. "Or it was when you finally woke up. I was trying to time your pulse," she adds at your grimace. And under her breath: "I wasn't sure whether I was making it up, it was so fucking faint."

"Oh," you mutter. "Oh. It's pretty late; we should probably get to class."

"Wh—" And she bursts into outright laughing then, as though she had entirely forgotten such things had ever existed. "Of  _course_ ," she mutters in disbelief. "We both just almost died and probably broke an axiom of the universe, but the  _real_  threat is tardies." She shakes her head between snorts. Then: "God, I think I have a History paper due today."

Her eyebrows twist, and she buries her head in her hands with another chuckle that lasts a long time—then brushes her sweat-dampened hair back off the face reddened by laughter instead of crying this time and looks you straight in the eye, more somber than she's ever been with you.

"Hunter, I don't understand how you're not dead right now."

You don't either. "…Lucky coincidence?" you offer with a shrug.

"No," she says softly. There's concern in her eyes, you think. "That was a big thing you just did. You defied one of the biggest rules we live by; that doesn't just happen by accident."

You shift uncomfortably, trying to figure out why her words bother you. "Maybe it killed someone else." (The thought doesn't fill you with guilt as you expect it to.)

She shakes her head again, slower this time. "It doesn't work like that," she says, but you can't tell whether she found this out as Clarkson or as a god. "The sacrifice has to be your own. A conscious choice, knowing  _exactly_  how much you're willing to give up—and then that _energy_  decides whether that's enough for what you want to do. It's usually a life, but it doesn't always have to be." She takes your palm and puts it against her cheek, curls up closer against your side. "What did you offer it, Hunter? What did it take?"

 _Everything_.

"I don't know," you say to the second question, and though it's the truth, it's not the whole of it—you're emptier than you can remember ever feeling, hollowed out like pumpkin just before Halloween. (What fills the empty space now resembles thick, black liquid shadows a lot more than it does warm candlelight.) You look at the world—look at  _her_ —and understand very little of it, yet too much, as if perfect omniscience were just slightly muddled, clouded in your mind.

You can't shake the thought that this should worry you.

"Hmm. I guess we'll find out soon enough," she says, as though she never wanted to find out at all—and silence falls upon you both.

Her eyes wander, to the walls, to the door, to the machine, to her hands—to practically  _anywhere_  but you. You almost prefer it that way, perfectly at ease with her intense, questioning gaze on you no longer, but though you have no desire to end the silence, you're certain she's about to—with something worse than those piercingly sharp eyes that so rarely miss anything.

And sure enough, perhaps a minute later, she takes a deep breath and looks back to you, gaze unreadable—though you can't say you're particularly trying to read it. "I… I don't know why I didn't say this before," she says quietly. There's some caution to the words. "Why I  _couldn't_. In that moment it just felt… I don't know. It's one more thing to apologize for, I guess."

She bites her bottom lip and flashes half a smile like that—and then, in a single, shaking breath, she whispers, "I  _love_  you, Hunter."

Your heart skips a beat.

It's the words you've ached to hear for longer than you can even remember, and they sound exactly like you had always imagined they would roll off her tongue—and yet when you hear them, nothing surges to the forefront of your mind. Not relief, not joy, not even some strange resentment that it  _took_  her so damn long. None of that fills you like it should, like you still somehow expect it to, and when you search yourself for the love you've harbored for Casey for so long, you come up blank.

"I love you," she repeats, and it sounds even easier this time—but you don't feel it, not for her, not anymore.

You'll realize in the coming weeks, in between incidents and altercations, that in a twistedly fitting way the cost for keeping Casey alive had been, among other things, the very love that had prompted you to want that outcome so badly in the first place—but right now she smiles at you in a toothy grin, alive and safe and  _happy,_  exactly as you'd wanted…

And you don't feel  _anything_.

 

 

_and i'd give up forever to touch you / what am i gonna do when the best part of me was always you? / and if i only could make a deal with god and get him to swap our places / when you're too in love to let it go, but if you don't try you'll never know just what you're worth / couldn't leave well enough alone, you were right, i'm wrong / i bet a lot of me was lost, t's uncrossed and i's undotted_

_oh, i loved you with the good and the careless of me / you may tire of me as our december sun is setting, because i'm not who i used to be/ i'll never say that i'll never love, but i don't say a lot of things / and i've lost who i am and i can't understand why my heart is so broken, rejecting your love / and if you're still bleeding, you're the lucky ones, 'cause most of our feelings, they are dead and they are gone_

_i won't always love what i'll never have; i won't always live in my regrets_

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

**(?.)**

_("Then what now? Do we try to revive Julie again?"_

" _She'll just fade out of existence, like before," Jade says, an absentminded hand on the scars once left by the kindest boy she'd ever known. "No, now we find another way."_

_Her faith had never rested on messing with Casey's mind to make her visit the cylinder a day earlier than she would've otherwise, but they had all been compelled to try—on the off chance that rewriting history into a victorious one (without the death and torture that same boy, no, monster, had inflicted on everyone, including himself) may really be as easy as letting her die when she was supposed to._

" _Plan E, and however many after that." She swivels on her chair and rises to look through the bookcase behind her. "I suspect Lara may be onto us, which means Headmaster, too, but if there's one thing the bastard ever taught me—" she drops a binder the size of a suitcase onto her desk and looks up at the other woman "—there's_ always _another way.")_

 

 

**_don't give away the end, the one thing that stays mine_ **

**Author's Note:**

>  _(All is lost, hope remains, and the war's not over hehehehehe. )_  
> 
> Alternate summary: all the ways Hunter loved Casey and how that love destroyed him. :DDDDDDDDD I know; I'll go into that corner over there. Yep.
> 
> Anyway, if you've made it to the end of this, dear reader, thank you from the bottom of my heart, and I hope you enjoyed it - and I would also like to kindly ask that you perhaps let me know??? In the form of kudos or even comments, if you wish. (I LOVE getting comments, no matter how short. It makes my whole entire day.) You don't have to, obviously, it's just that my MG fics typically get very very little feedback outside of people who are my friends (and whom I persistently badger into telling me good things about my writing shhh), and usually that's okay-- BUT I spent literal months working on this one and I'm suuuuuuuuper proud of it (I can't even remember the last time I was this proud of my writing, or even any of my accomplishments in general), so I'd kinda like to have that feeling validated.
> 
> But, y'know, *nonchalant hairflip*, whatever.


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